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Changes in the Teaching of Folk and Traditional : Folkworks and Predecessors

Thesis

M. Price

Submitted in fulfilment of the degree of PhD

Newcastle University November 2017

i Abstract

Formalised education in Britain has received little academic attention, despite having been an integral part of folk music practice since the early 1900s. This thesis explores the major turns, trends and ideological standpoints that have arisen over more than a century of institutionalised folk music pedagogy. Using historical sources, interviews and observation, the thesis examines the impact of the two main periods of folk revival in the UK, examining the underlying beliefs and ideological agendas of influential figures and organisations, and the legacies and challenges they left for later educators in the field.

Beginning with the first revival of the early 1900s, the thesis examines how the initial collaboration and later conflict between music teacher and folk collector , and social worker and missionary Mary Neal, laid down the foundations of folk music education that would stand for half a century. A discussion of the inter-war period follows, tracing the impact of wireless broadcasting technology and competitive music festivals, and the possibilities they presented for both music education and folk music practice. The second, post-war revival’s dominance by a radical leftwing political agenda led to profound changes in pedagogical stance; the rejections of prior practice models are examined with particular regard to new approaches to folk music in schools. Finally, the thesis assesses the ways in which Folkworks and their contemporaries in the late 1980s and onward were able to both adapt and improve upon previous approaches.

The research reveals how a conflict between opposing views of folk music education prior to the First World War led to an artificial polarisation of pedagogical approaches that was not fully resolved until the late 1980s, affecting the practice of several generations of teachers often unaware of constraints of the legacy they were working within. In presenting possible solution to this dichotomy, Folkworks demonstrated a way ahead for the community of folk educators that was to prove influential.

ii

Acknowledgements:

I am obliged to both the Arts & Humanities Research Council, and to North Music Trust for their assistance with this project.

Much gratitude my Mother, Father, my sister Helen, my partner Britta and the rest of my family who have put up with this for so long. Thankyou, from the bottom of my heart: this is yours as much as mine.

Many thanks to Doctors Vic Gammon and Ian Biddle for being there and showing belief in me at the start and the end of this work respectively, and to all the other academics who have been involved with this project goes thanks commensurate with their respective input.

Thanks to all the lovely people I met through Folkworks, and especially Alistair Anderson, David Oliver and Stewart Hardy for their time.

Thanks also to my fellow students for being a tight knit and supportive group.

Dedication:

To the memory of our friend and colleague Darren James Fenn.

iii iv CONTENTS

Abstract iii

Acknowledgements iv

Contents vi

List of Tables viii

Introduction 1

Situating Myself 2 Defining Folk 5 Participation and the Folk Scene 8 Methodologies 11 Autoethnography: History, Development, Controversy 16 Autoethnography in Practice 20 Methodologies in Contrast 23 Thesis Parameters 25 Thesis Overview 28

1. Chapter 1: Folk Music Education: An 33 Untold Story

1.1 The Groundwork of Revival 35 1.2 19th Century Collections: from Scholar to 37 Singer 1.3 The Folk Song Society 44 1.3.1 An overview of the prevailing 46 conceptions of folk music circa 1900. 1.4 Mary Neal and the Espérance Morris 49 Guild 1.5 Cecil Sharp and the Board of Education. 57 1.5.1 Cecil Sharp: Educator 59 1.5.2 Against ’s Stigma as das Land 60 Ohne Musik. 1.6 Neal and Sharp in Contrast 66 1.6.1 Aftermath and Legacy 70

2 Chapter 2: Between The Wars: 72 Competitive Folk Music and the BBC’s Schools Programme

2.1 Competitive Folk Music 77 2.1.1 and the Eisteddfodau 78

v 2.1.2 and the Great 79 2.1.3 The Northumbrian Small Pipes 80 2.1.4 : the Roots of Comhaltas 81 Ceoltóirí Êireann 2.2 Mary Wakefield and the Competition 84 Festival 2.2.1 Folk Song Competition in England 88 2.2.2 Competition and Pedagogy. 90 2.3 Wireless Technology and the Birth of 91 British Broadcasting 2.3.1 The BBC and Music Education 94 2.4 Together: Folk Song for Schools 98 2.4.1 Methodology and Resources 100 2.5 Wartime 1940s: Singing Together For 103 Comfort 2.5.1 Post-War 1940s: A New Beginning 111 2.5.2 1950s: A More Stable Curriculum 114 2.5.3 1960s: a Focus on Folk 119 2.5.4 1970s: A World of music 122 2.5.5 1980s: Change in the Air 127 2.5.6 1990s: Decline and Disappearance 1130 2.6 Singing Together Overall Summary 133 2.6.1 Concluding Thoughts: Wakefield and the 140 BBC 142 3 Chapter 3. Folk Music Education in the Postwar-Revival

3.1 Post-war Revival: Ideas and Influences 142 3.2 Records: The (R)evolving Tradition 149 3.3 The Critic’s Group 151 3.4 Folk Music in Schools 154 3.4.1 Suitability 157 3.4.2 Inspiration Beyond Music 160 3.4.3 Ownership and Agency 162 3.4.4 Aurality 165 3.4.5 Interpretation and Accompaniment 167 3.5 Folk Song In Schools: Nealism re-visited 170

4 Chapter 4. Folkworks: Tradition in 174 the Making

4.1 Alistair Anderson: The Importance of 175 Inspiration 4.2 Folkworks’ Educational Precursors 182 4.3 The Foundations of Folkworks 185 4.4 Folkworks and Teaching Style: “In 193 Comes I…” 4.5 Observation: Folkworking 198 4.5.1 Stewart Hardy’s Assessment: Four 208

vi Values 4.6 Twin Track: the Best of Neal, Wakefield 210 and Sharp? 4.6.1 The Legacy of Folkworks 214

Conclusions 222

The First Folk Revival 223 The Inter-war Period 227 The Second Folk Revival 230 The Folkworks Intervention 232 The Value of Folk Music Education 236 For the Future… 237

Bibliography of Works Consulted 241

Appendix 251

List of Tables:

1.6 Table 1: Sharp Vs Neal 69

2.5 Table 2: from‘Singing Together’ 110 April – June 1940

vii

Introduction

Since the beginnings of the first folk revival in England in the early 1900s, there have been attempts to codify and organise the teaching of folk and traditional music. Since those early days, through the work of numerous dedicated organisations, institutions and individuals, folk music tuition has continued to expand into a variety of formal settings: from school classrooms and residential weekends to evening classes, festival workshops and even degree courses. Yet despite more than a century having passed since the first revival began in earnest, there has been little attempt to document the history of folk music education practice, and as a result successive generations of folk educators have found themselves ‘re-invented the wheel’ with little knowledge of prior practice to guide them.

This project sets out to explore and document the major trends that have arisen within formal folk music education, examining the assumptions, beliefs and agendas that shaped each successive wave of development, tracing the ways in which each movement borrowed from, rejected or simply ignored previous approaches, to build up a picture of the continuities and disconnections that have shaped folk music education for over one hundred years. The research focus is the practices that took hold in England, bringing in influences from the wider UK and Ireland where relevant, starting from the first educational impulses that were central to the initial revival efforts, examining each of the major developments in the field of folk music. A deep-seated conflict between two rival factions during the first revival is revealed as having an ongoing divisive legacy that would remain largely unresolved until the intervention of the folk arts development agency Folkworks after 1988.

It is hoped that this research will be of use to both scholars and practitioners of folk music, as an overarching assessment of folk music education history has hitherto been unavailable. By highlighting how the underlying ideological and pedagogical stances of the most influential approaches since the initial revival have shaped each of their successors in turn, a basis is provided for a historically informed view of current practice, which can be both better understood and more accurately questioned when its roots are revealed.

This introduction will begin by setting out my personal connection to both the music and the research, in an effort to foreground and outline my own subjective position from the outset. A discussion of the currently prevailing conceptions of folk music and the attendant folk scene follows, and includes a discussion of how these terms are used throughout the thesis. After 1 brief assessment of the nature of folk music participation and learning in England and the wider UK, an overview of the thesis as a whole outlines the themes explored in each chapter.

Situating Myself

I cannot claim a wholly objective and dispassionate relationship to the subject matter of this thesis, and nor do I wish to: folk music education has not only formed a significant part of my formative musical experiences, but has also been a consistent component of my professional practice since my mid teens. In short, I have interests in the outcome of this thesis beyond attaining the qualification itself, as it is hoped to be of use to my fellow practitioners within my own professional, cultural and social sphere. I care deeply about the effective teaching of folk music; as will be revealed below, I took on first a degree and then a Ph.D in folk and traditional music primarily in order to become a better practitioner, rather than to seek external academic validation of my abilities, and I have continued to teach in various capacities throughout the period of my studentship.

To break from the pretence of maintaining a consistently objective, scientific distance from the subject can no longer be considered a revolutionary stance. The rise of Postmodern philosophical thought has presented a series of significant challenges to the previously dominant Positivist paradigm. The Modernist goal of describing universal truth has been depicted as highly suspect “dream of power over others”,1 and the viability and validity of all meta-narrative has been called into question. The Empirical approach to representing knowledge has been exposed as deeply dependant on its historical legacy to perform as its own legitimising narrative, whilst simultaneously fiercely suppressing other forms of narrative knowledge.2 The traditional ‘author absent’ scholarly voice was implicated in supporting this illusion of singular legitimacy, with the objective position reduced to “…descriptions and analyses in which reference to the subject, the describer and analyst, is {sic} omitted. This makes objectivity merely the name of a rhetorical style”.3 The texts we produce as scholars can no longer be thought of as transmitting a fixed meaning—the ‘message’ of an Author-God—but rather as a multifaceted concoction of prior writings; a ‘tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture’, its meaning determined

1 Sarah Wall, ‘An autoethnography on learning about autoethnography’. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 5/2 (2006), Article 9, 3. 2 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (: Manchester University Press, 1984). (NB. Original French publication 1979). 3 David J. Hufford, ‘The scholarly voice: Reflexivity in belief studies’, Western , 54 (1995), 57-76, (58). 2 not by the singular intention of the writer, but by the individual interpretation of the reader.4 In this philosophical climate, there can be ‘no view from nowhere’ (to subversively paraphrase Thomas Nagel), as any observations are always-already mediated through the cultural values, assumptions, language and positionality of the observer.5 The ‘eye’ and the ‘I’ of the author are exposed as one and the same.

To this end, there follows a short account of my personal journey into folk music, as a practitioner, a student and a teacher, in the process forming a stated recognition of the subjective position of deep yet narrow knowledge from which this study was begun, and foregrounding this to the reader from the outset as a point of honesty. Throughout the thesis, my first person, subjective voice will re-emerge as needed. This will mostly occur in this introduction and in the final chapter detailing my own involvement with Folkworks: situations where to present my own direct contact with the subject as anything other than an inherently subjective account would be disingenuous.

I do not remember a time when folk music was not a part of my life. My mother was still a gigging player late into her pregnancy with me—she jokes that I should have been born with a corrugated head—so my first encounters with folk music may well have been in utero; even if this is more fanciful than factual, I was certainly surrounded by folk music before I could either walk or talk: present as part of me even before I had a coherent sense of self. I was lucky enough to have folk music and dance feature prominently in the musical life of my school. Even in the mid 1980s this would have been considered an old fashioned inclusion in the curriculum, but it served to give me a solid grounding in the basic concepts of folk music. I knew a small repertoire of folk songs, and I knew a from a ; perhaps more importantly, I knew how to feel the difference as a dancer as well as a player. Although art music also featured, in the school orchestra I was a fairly hopeless and disinterested cellist; I read music poorly, felt no connection with the music. Discovering that I could teach myself the guitar and play without it ever feeling like work was a life changing experience, but it also had the effect of strengthening my connection with folk music. Whether I was trying to learn a heavy metal riff or a , this new, self-directed way of learning—picking it up by ear and memorising it through repetition at my own pace—suited my teenage temperament far better than sheet music and sonata form. I had discovered a route to musical autonomy, and folk music was an enabling force in this.

4 Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text (: HarperCollins, 1977), 146. 5 Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body (California: University of California Press, 2003) (10th Anniversary Edition), 220-221. 3

I attended my first folk festival in my early teens, surprised to find that there were other teenagers who not only knew this music, but genuinely liked it and could play it: some of them much better than I did. I attended workshops, bought recordings and went to gigs, all in an attempt to immerse myself in the music. The next major development was discovering a love for a cappella singing. Together with a small group of the friends I most frequently played music with, I attended a Village Harmony Summer Camp; this American group specialised in world harmony traditions, with a repertoire including Balkan, South African and American music. An intensive week of rehearsal, during which an entire concert repertoire was memorised, was followed by a further ten days on tour around the UK. Enthused, my friends and I returned to school that September demanding to keep singing. We were lucky to have the right music teacher, and with her expertise and guidance, the eventual outcome was the formation of the youth vocal ensemble Stream of Sound in 1997. Nearly twenty years later, I am co-director of the group, and although living too far away to attend weekly rehearsals, I still teach at their residential weekends and workshops.

By the time I left school, I was already both gigging and teaching as a guitarist, beginning to find some facility on the guitar and , and singing, touring and teaching with Stream of Sound. A college course in popular music followed, after which I worked as a peripatetic guitar teacher, supplementing my income by working in a music shop. By my mid twenties, teaching was inherent in my conception of what the practice of folk music should be. The musicians who had inspired me had been generous in giving their time and expertise, to the extent that I strongly believed, without ever questioning the conviction, that an intrinsic part of being a folk musician was sharing the music with others. The better you got, the more you should give back: those who were musically selfish were not, at least in my idealistic opinion, doing folk music properly. It was this thought process that led me to leave the to study folk music at degree level in Newcastle: the better I became as a folk musician, the more help I could offer to others.

It was through my degree that I first came into contact with Folkworks, as the course I was taking was partially based in the same building as them at the time: The Sage Gateshead. Over time I was asked to take on occasional teaching work and gigs for them, and several key Folkworks staff members also lectured on my degree course on performance and teaching modules. After graduating, my degree programme director pointed out an AHRC funded, Collaborative Doctoral Award research post, examining the way in which methods and

4 influence of Folkworks had changed folk music teaching since 1988: I applied with little hesitation. The fact that the post required the student to take on some teaching stood me in good stead, as I was already taking on ad hoc teaching for the organisation: my application was successful. An unexpected turn of events after three months led to a major change of direction, as the organisation required me to take on more teaching much earlier in the project than initially planned.

It was during this teaching period that the lack of context within which to assess Folkworks’ contribution became apparent. Discussions centred upon change require a prior state for meaningful comparison, yet there was no coherent documented history of folk music education available, and what little evidence there was existed in fragmentary state, with no connections to previous or following practice. Attempting to fill this research gap expanded until the search for context became the project itself. The overriding question became twofold: what were the major changes in the way institutionalised folk music was taught since the first revival, and how had they interacted, up to and including the arrival of Folkworks?

Defining Folk

From an outsider perspective, the UK’s folk music culture can present a bewildering prospect; it can appear as a rustic, rural and even backward set of practices, the connections between which are not always readily apparent. Whether jingling Morris dancers on the village green for Mayday, an evening session in a in which everybody appears to know the tunes already, an elaborately costumed Mummer’s play in the town square on Boxing Day, a group singing to the apple trees in an orchard during , or any other practice associated with the traditional rituals of the calendar, the relevance to everyday life in the twenty-first century can seem tangential at best. Yet to those for whom folk music, dance or forms a part of their own cultural practice, these same events are a communal celebration that can at once surround, include and ground them, through a common feeling of connection: connection backward to their cultural heritage, to the present through the passing of the seasons, outward to the people they undertake these activities with, and forward to the who will keep the tradition alive. Folk music making is a determinedly communal, intensely social experience, and yet it can be difficult world to gain entry to, and even harder to describe. Most practicing folk musicians can tell you in detail how they participate in folk music, when and who with, but few can define what folk music actually is;

5 in fact, this difficulty in reaching a conclusive meaning has been an issue since term folk music was first used.

Since Herder’s coining of the term Volkslied (folksong) in German in the 1770s, a word he created to describe a music which expressed the quintessence of a people, folk music has repeatedly eluded precise definition; in fact, the wider community of folk musicians has been accused of actively shying away from reaching a definition, preferring to leave the question hanging, unanswered.6 In keeping with this tradition, this introduction will not answer the question definitively or objectively, but rather seek to expose my own subjective personal position for what it is.

A simple and generalist definition, such as Nettl’s and Myers’ 1976 assertion that folk music is defined ‘as the music of the “folk’, or the people’, fails to satisfy, largely because the meaning that successive waves of collectors have attached to the word folk has fluctuated considerably.7 For the Victorian folk song collectors of the first revival, following largely unknowingly after the ideas of Herder, folk song was the time-eroded survival of the poetic expression of a wider folk culture; a window into a past now lost, in which the natural, rural state of the pre-industrial people—the folk—could be glimpsed in tantalizing fragment. For these early enthusiasts, all the folk music that could ever exist had already been made, as the conditions that were necessary for its creation had ceased to be, and could never be recreated: the ‘unlettered peasant’ was no more. For the activists of the second revival, by contrast, the meaning of ‘the folk’ was redefined as ‘the working class’, and folk music was thus re- conceptualized as the musical expression of the class warfare of prior generations. As this struggle continued into the present, folk music was now seen as a living continuum directly connecting its current proponents to their forebears through common experience: folk music could now be written in the present.

The academic study of folk song has similarly failed to produce a single universally accepted notion of what folk music is. A concerted attempt to reach a definition of folk music at the 1952 Annual Conference of the International Folk Music Council predictably failed to satisfy all of the delegates, but a provisional resolution was passed including the following wording:

6 Mark D. Moss, ‘The first words. . .’ Sing Out! The Folk Song Magazine, 40/1 (May/June/July 1995), (2). 7 Bruno Nettl, & Helen Myers, Folk music in the : An introduction (3rd ed.) (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1976). 6 {Folk music is} music that has been submitted to the process of oral transmission. It is the product of oral transmission. It is the product of evolution and is dependent on the circumstances of continuity, variation and selection.8

This concept shifts the defining feature away from the material of the folk music itself, focusing instead on the evolutionary process necessary for a song to take on the mantle of folk: songs are not made as folk from their inception—there is no inherent folk essence—but rather they become folk songs through transmission between singers over the passage of time. Folk was now something to be attained, not unearthed. To an extent, these ideas followed on from the functionalist approach developed by American folklore scholars of the 1930s and 1940s, for whom folklore could be defined by the role it played within a society; collectors such as would apply the same ideas to the study of folk song:9 folk isn’t something music is, folk is something music does.

As my studies progressed, I began to make a habit of asking practicing folk musicians whose opinions I found interesting to tell me what their personal definition of folk music was. None would commit to a definite answer, some demurred entirely, others still repeated the “music of the people” tropes. Two answers, however, stayed with me. The first was from Piers Cawley, a fine singer I first met as the husband of a course mate at university: “Folk music is made both by and for practitioners”. The second was from Phil Tyler, a stalwart of the Sacred singing scene in the UK, and old time fiddler and player: “Folk music is music that we can make right now”. These two statements suggested that it was those who made folk music, not the music itself, that made folk what it was. This tallied with my own thinking at the time, as I was beginning to question whether playing folk music on big festival or club stages, through a multi-thousand watt PA system to a distant, seated, paying audience was actually folk at all.10 Singing around the kitchen table with friends, sitting in a pub session, even performing at folk clubs or ceilidhs, it still felt like there were levels of community involvement, without an enforced performer/audience divide that the larger venues imposed: the bigger gigs just felt like show business.

8 Maud Karpeles, ‘Definition of Folk Music’. Journal of the International Folk Music Council, 7 (1955), 6–7. 9 Patrick B. Mullen, The Man who Adores the Negro: Race and American Folklore (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 89-91. 10 I spent several years playing in an Anglo-Turkish Fusion band: Dogan Mehmet & The Boombox Caravan. Over approximately four years, we played a fair number of the UK folk festivals (Sidmouth/Broadstairs//Wadebridge/ On Fire etc.), as well as mainstream and festivals (/Big River/London Remix/Womad etc). There were two studio , and some live session airplay on Radio 3’s Late Junction show. Whilst I am not claiming to have scaled the heights of folk stardom (whatever they may be) I believe it was a sufficient experience of the industry side of the folk scene (with the attendant agents, managers, record labels and promoters) to know that I was uncomfortable. 7 My gut instinct was telling me that an inward facing, communally focused definition was what I personally required, perhaps combining the two statements above into something approximating ‘Folk is music we can make for ourselves right now’. I remained slightly suspicious of my own sentiment however: isn’t that just the kind of definition that somebody who makes a living from teaching folk music at community level would espouse? I was also unable to completely let go of the thrill of the old that captivated the first revival’s collectors, the necessity of social relevance from the second revival, the idea of an evolutionary folk process or the notion that folk music did cultural work both on behalf of and within the community in which it originated. All of these definitions are layered within the meaning of folk music for me, and all of them inform the meanings which I attach to it. In addition, I am uncomfortable with the notion of imposing meaning on folk music on behalf of others: who am I to tell them that their fun is somehow wrong?

With all of those considerations in mind, my personal approach to defining folk within this project is to adopt a functional descriptivist position; if group or community (or the individuals within them) believes that the activity they are engaged in is the making of folk music, and it performs the function that they expect folk music to fulfill for them, then that is how the activity in question will be described.

Participation and the Folk Scene

The settings in which participatory folk music occurs vary according to local tradition and expectation, but in broad terms they include folk clubs, folk festivals, pub sessions and singarounds, ceilidhs and barn dances, as well as various calendar rituals including (but not limited to) wassailing, caroling, pace-egging and celebrations. When taken together with non-participatory events such as concerts and broadcasts, these activities describe what is referred to as ‘the folk scene’. However, in practice the concept of a unified folk scene is problematic from an insider perspective. Each individual within the scene experiences folk music participation through one or more potentially overlapping communities in which they are active, and which shape their conceptions of what folk is, was and should be. To assume that the national scene is a reflected macrocosm of their own experience is a natural and understandable conclusion, and the impression is reinforced by a national industry of venues, festivals, recording artists, music retailers and broadcasters that transcend the local, providing a meta-level commonality of folk consumption across the various more localised

8 communities. The reality is that practice differs greatly from region to region and group to group, and can lead to confusion and even conflict when two or more sets of expectations collide without prior knowledge of the other.

The pub session, for example, would seem a simple concept: musicians sitting together in a pub playing music together. Yet these sessions are neither bounded nor fully permeable, and the habits of one localised variant of tradition can easily and unknowingly infringe upon that of another when individual musicians move between settings. A CCÉ run Irish session, for example, will often have appointed session leaders and an unspoken hierarchy; to sit in the designated circle of ‘musician’s seats’ to begin playing before they arrive, or to start a set of tunes uninvited is seen as deeply disrespectful, and can result in a player being ‘frozen out’ by the other musicians, who simply refuse to acknowledge the offender’s presence until they leave.11 Another session at a different pub a few hundred yards down the road may have a completely different set of expectations and practices: a player wanting to have a seat saved for them, or expecting the session to wait until they arrived before the music started, would be seen as both pretentious and arrogant.

Such potential tensions can co-exist almost next door to one another. Turning to my own local area, within the geographical area that would define the physical territory of my ‘local scene’ there are two sessions that would seem to have such a contradictory ethos as to mutually exclude each other. The first is a session at the Irish Centre in Newcastle, in which acquaintances arriving from southern English traditions have experienced being frozen out, been asked to leave or told to stop playing for unwittingly transgressing the unspoken rules; two miles away in Byker, the regulars at the ABI session in The Cumberland Arms would frown on anybody launching into an Irish tune, even if they were not aware that the acronym stood for ‘Anything But Irish’. That acronym itself is an interesting reflection of the tensions of the local scene: the Irish repertoire being so dominant that a protected space for everything else was deemed to be a necessity. Of course, neither session is ‘doing it wrong’ objectively, but transposing the habitual behaviours of one session into the space of the other could create conflict.

Conceptions of what constitutes folk tradition can be similarly laden with difficulty, as they are often centred on ideas of a simultaneously imagined and idealised past. To many, the folk

11 Helen O’Shea, ‘Getting to the Heart of the Music: Idealizing Musical Community and Sessions’, Journal of the Society for in Ireland, 2 (2006-7), 1-18 (5-7). 9 tradition ‘happened’ around the same time that the Christmas traditions that we re-enact every year ‘happened’: in between Yore and Yesteryear, some time between half past Hardy and quarter to Dickens. The analogy with Christmas is apt, as in both cases many of the assumptions about the antiquity and authenticity of the practices entailed within the ritualisation go willfully unexamined, for the simple reason that we have no wish to endanger the comforting illusion we choose to invest in; just as no parent relishes the task of admitting to a child that not only is Father Christmas a myth, but that they have helped to perpetuate that myth, so folk musicians are often careful to avoid confronting their own cherished mythologizing, for fear of it proving false: if everybody keeps pretending together, it stays real. Again, the individual ideas can differ from musician to musician.

In essence, when discussing ‘the scene’ or ‘the tradition’, what is meant is a complex and multi-layered plurality of smaller scenes and traditions, colliding, co-existing and overlapping within a shared perception of being “part of something”. The commonality is in belonging: a community of communities. Both the individual sub-communities and the meta-community that bounds them are both defined by practice rather than by geographical limitations, as the UK is small enough for musicians to travel between cities and counties with relative ease, if the draw of a particular event is great enough. Festivals are a good example of this, as the more prestigious events can draw national and international crowds, and multiple sub- communities can be represented simultaneously, all of which are displaced from their usual locations. As Fay Hield has argued, conceptions of community are central to the way folk singing functions socially, and yet the singers rarely describe themselves as a community.12

In 1991, Lave and Wenger challenged concepts of learning based on the acquisition, internalisation and transmission of reified, abstracted, factual knowledge by the individual. Instead, they proposed a model of learning in which knowledge is constructed during the interactions between members of a group of likeminded practitioners, emphasising the “inherently socially negotiated character of meaning and the interested, concerned character of the thought and actions of persons-in-activity”.13 By developing the concept of learning-as- apprenticeship, they project a route from beginner to expert via a period of ‘Legitimate Peripheral Participation’, as the learner acquires the necessary skills and experience by interacting with more seasoned practitioners, taking place within the context in which the

12 Fay Hield, English Folk Singing and the Construction of Community (PhD thesis) (Sheffield: University of Sheffield, 2010). 13 Jean Lave & Etienne Wenger. Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 10 knowledge is to be used. This locus of similarly focused individuals of varying experience is termed a ‘Community of Practice’. This and other models of practice-based learning have subsequently been critiqued as not being universally applicable, failing to explain the acquisition of theoretical or abstract knowledge; Yakhlef stresses that under a strict interpretation of Lave and Wenger’s theorisation, all that school children learned in school would be how to participate in the school community, with no actual knowledge of the subjects they were taught.14 Despite these flaws, situated learning is still a valid analogy for examining learning that expressly follows the patterns outlined above, one such area being the communal practice of folk and traditional musicians, as their practice is not defined by location, and accommodates varying levels of participant ability. For the purposes of this thesis, it is these ideas of a diffuse, permeable and fluid plurality of communities, connected by related praxis and sense of belong, that is meant when ‘the scene’ or ‘the community’ are under discussion.

Methodologies

Histories are constructs by nature. New histories do not lie hidden yet fully formed, awaiting discovery by a fortuitously passing historian; rather, they come into existence through the act of writing.15 It is no coincidence that we date the beginning of the historical era from the invention of the first writing system: Babylonian cuneiform.16 Although the artifacts, documents and other sources of evidence on which histories are based may exist independently for centuries, it is the act of attaching significance to sources, and arranging these instances of significance into a meaningfully interconnected narrative, that creates a history. Acknowledging this process involves accepting the interdependence between scholar and source, as what can be deemed knowable (and thus admissible as evidence) changes according to the unique viewpoint the scholar.17 If to create a history is an act of interpretation, we must recognize the role of the historian as interpreter. Even setting the influence of the individual scholar aside for the moment, the nature of what can be learned about any given period or aspect of human existence is intrinsically tied to nature of the available evidence.18 It is for these reasons that the re-versioned histories written by

14 Ali Yakhlef, ‘The three facets of knowledge: A critique of the practice-based learning theory’, Research Policy, 39/1 (2010), 39-46 (39). 15 Martha Howell & Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods (New York: Cornell University Press, 2001), 1. 16 Ibid, 24. 17 M. M. Postan, Fact and relevance: Essays on Historical Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 53. 18 John Tosh, The Pursuit of History (3rd Ed.) (London: Longman, 2002), 54. 11 successive generations of researchers become as much a reflection of in which they were written in as they are of they times they seek to portray; even a seemingly long established history such as that of Imperial Rome is consistently under re-negotiation, as new questions are put to old evidence.19

As it became clear that one of the major aims of this project would be the writing of a history of folk music education in England, so too did the need become clear to define some broad research questions that would enable a meaningful interrogation of the sources. Four research questions (see Thesis Parameters, below) formed the pillars of the enquiry, both for each chapter individually, and for the thesis as a whole; although the questions were reworded and refined several times during the course of the research, the underlying themes remained thankfully consistent throughout the course of the study. However, as the thesis would entail research into multiple historical periods, each period would also in turn present not only different questions and challenges, but also each would need to be assessed using slightly different data and criteria in order to offer meaningful outcomes from the same initial set of research questions. A standard PhD thesis format of a literature review followed by a methodology and then two or three case studies would not suffice; each chapter had to be approached as a separate entity, with the relevant reviews of pre-existing literature offered as an integral part of the narrative flow.

Most of the evidence available for this thesis was in written form, whether as press clippings, publications by relevant individuals and groups, personal correspondence or similar. These primary sources, contemporary to the events under scrutiny, are typically where the hunt begins to unearth the building blocks of a historical narrative. Secondary sources, including any extant scholarly discourse around the subject, are used to establish the context in which the new study takes place; they tell us what is already known in our field (allowing us to establish some boundaries to the field of enquiry), and what critical avenues have been explored previously (showing us which new ground we can usefully cover in our work). Typically, this process begins with intensive and extensive reading of historical sources, in an attempt to gather as much information surrounding the area of enquiry as possible. Once this initial intake of information has reached a critical mass, the researcher can begin sift though and prioritise which of this information is pertinent to the enquiry at hand. Themes and repetitions within the larger discourse begin to surface, and it is from these emerging trends that a narrative path through the patchwork of sources can begin to be drawn. This cannot be

19 Mary Beard, SPQR (London: Profile Books Ltd, 2016), 15-19. 12 done uncritically, as sources must be scrutinized and cross-referenced to establish their reliability and veracity; as Martha Howell & Walter Prevenier are keen to stress, historical sources ‘are not innocent of design or motive’.20 Many of the sources consulted for this thesis are deeply partisan documents, written to further an inherent personal, political or ideological agenda, either of an individual or group. Such writings have come to be described as ‘ego documents’; this term, coined by the Dutch scholar Jacques Presser in the 1950s,21 and making its way into English usage during the 1990s through the work of Peter Burke,22 has come to encompass personal diaries and published diatribes alike.23 Ordinarily it might be the historian’s task to identify and circumvent the biases of the source in pursuit of more objectively factual information, but much of the research for this thesis entailed the unmasking and foregrounding of those very biases; in the case of the first chapter, for instance, whether assessing a polemic like Cecil Sharp’s English Folk Song: Some Conclusions or an autobiographical narrative such as Mary Neal’s As A Tale That is Told…, it was the underlying agenda, rather than the face value of the ‘facts’ presented in the text, that was of primary interest. Whilst seemingly paradoxical, a reliably unreliable witness — one whose biases and agendas are consistent in the way they skew the portrayal of events— can still produce a useful testimony, so long as the elements that define their unreliability can be understood and accounted for.

This is not to suggest that the establishment of accurate factual information was not an important requirement for this thesis. The ability to find multiple credible sources to establish the circumstances around an event —such as the date and time, or the persons present, for example— was vital to supporting the unfolding narrative. Continuing with the example of assessing Sharp and Neal’s roles in the first revival, other sources were needed to place their actions and publications within a meaningful context. In an age before broadcast technology, the public demand for consumable media led to a proliferation of specialist periodicals, and much of the public discourse during the pre-war discussion of folk music education took place in the pages of such music newspapers such as the Musical Times or the Musical Herald in a variety of forms: interviews, letters to the editor, reviews, adverts and commissioned articles. Accessible as never before through services such as British Periodicals Online, this highly visible back-and forth between those with a vested public interest in folk music collection and

20 Howell & Prevenier, 2001, 18. 21 A detailed English language overview of the development of the term can be found in: Rudolph Dekker, ‘Jacques Presser’s Heritage: Ego Documents in the Study of History’, Memoria y Civilazaçion, 5, (2002), 13-37. 22 Peter Burke, ‘Representation of the Self, from Petrarch to Descartes’ in Roy Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Histories from the to the Present, (London: Routledge, 1996), 21. 23 Dekker, 2002. 13 dissemination was to provide a useful touchstone for contemporary perceptions and representations of events as they were occurring during the fast paced developments of the first revival. Music newspapers and magazines, although often focused on events in the capital at the expense of regional coverage, could also be used as reliable and verifiable corroborating evidence for the dating of events.

Although the majority of the sources for this thesis were not ideally suited to generating numerical data, there were elements that could be manipulated to produce quantitative outputs. For the latter half of the second chapter (an enquiry into the impact of the BBC’s school music broadcasts) there were sufficient comparable primary sources to enable a degree of quantitative analysis. The radio show chosen to explore this question produced booklets to accompany each academic term’s curriculum for almost the entirety of its broadcast run, and it was possible to borrow or purchase these booklets in sufficient quantity to enable the construction of a database, from which could be extrapolated numerical data. The booklets were chosen as the data source as they represented a stable element which was consistent and comparable throughout the lifetime of the show; whilst some incomplete sets of audio recordings from the latter decades’ broadcasts are in the hands of private collectors, the near total absence from the BBC’s archives of audio records from the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s meant that the broadcasts themselves could not be the basis of the data set. The aim of this section of the thesis was to explore the extent to which the BBC had made use of folk song in its schools broadcasts, and thus the ability to express this information as a percentage of the total number of songs broadcast was invaluable evidence. The appendix to this thesis details the data used to establish the figures, whilst the numerical breakdowns are found in chapter section 2.5.

This thesis was not limited to a purely historical outlook, however, as the some of the more recent sources either originated well within living memory or were contemporary at the time of writing, and some of the key figures in the narratives of the later chapters were potentially available for interview. Thus the historical methods described so far would need to be supplemented by methods more common to ethnomusicology and sociology. There was an additional complicating factor: these additional methodologies would need to be able to accommodate my own presence in the narrative, as much of my research would be directly drawn from teaching, learning and observing as part of the Folkworks education programme. I would need to look beyond the borders of traditional historical research, and in doing so it became clear that historical methods have significant overlap with a field of enquiry that sociologists and anthropologists would recognize as qualitative research, both approaches

14 being concerned with extracting meaning from their sources (which qualitative researchers would term ‘empirical materials’ or ‘data’) through assessing their content, but without a heavy reliance on numerically expressed outputs or scientific replicability.24

The field of qualitative research encompasses a diverse, interdisciplinary, and even contradictory set of methods, terms and conventions that defy succinct definition. There are no hard and fast rules for the assessment of qualitative data, and indeed many qualitative researchers would actively resist prescriptive or formulaic approaches, in the belief that the nature of qualitative enquiry is far more akin to an art than science.25 There are some commonalities, however, that can be found across the majority of qualitative research projects and can be said to be characteristic of the field. Firstly, the nature of the data itself is often the determining factor in the design of the research framework, rather than applying a pre-existent set of assessment criteria; in this ‘research act’, as characterized by Norman Denzin, the interactional moment between the researcher and subject leads to the generation of theoretical concepts.26 Qualitative research is thus both interpretative and inductive, beginning with the specific and working outwards towards the general, with the simultaneous gathering and analyzing of data a second feature common to many projects falling under the aegis of qualitative inquiry.27 Finally, qualitative research often features a range of interconnected methodologies, sometimes pieced together from several existing approaches or newly invented in response to the research context, but always with the intent of acquiring ‘a better fix on the subject matter at hand’.28

Ultimately, the method I chose, altered and developed to explore the tension of a researcher who was to become increasingly visible within the narrative as it progressed was a hybridized approach to autoethnography, incorporating elements of ethnography, field work and research. Autoethnography had seen fairly limited use in musicology at the time of this research, and was regarded as a fringe discipline at best.29 It is also a rapidly developing, internally fractured, deeply contentious field of study, incorporating multiple approaches to

24 Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, The Landscape of Qualitative Research: Theories and Issues (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1998), 4. 25 Colin Robson, Real World Research (: Blackwell, 1993), 370-371. 26 Norman K. Denzin, The Research Act in Sociology: A Theoretical Introduction to Sociological Methods (London: Butterworths, 1970). 27 Denzin & Lincoln, 1998, 3-6. 28 Ibid, 3. 29 The one notable exception was this edited collection of essays on the intersection of autoethnographic method and music studies: Carolyn Ellis and Brydie-Leigh Bartlett, Music Autoethnographies: Making Autoethnography Sing/Making Music Personal, (Bowen Hills: Australian Academic Press, 2009). It did not feature in my personal work, as it largely falls within the Ellis/Bochner ‘evocative’ school of autoethnography, which was not my chosen methodological framing. 15 both performing and reporting research, some of which are wholly incompatible with others. To illustrate the personal interpretation of the methodology I have applied, there follows a brief exploration of the way the term has developed and shifted in meaning over time, including the notion that the practice of autoethnography has had an unacknowledged presence in the historical and ethnographic traditions that predates the coining of the word itself by some considerable time.

Autoethnography: History, Development and Controversy

The first use of the term autoethnography in print is routinely credited to David Hayano, but this is actually a somewhat misleading simplification of the genesis of the term.30 Firstly, it had already appeared in print earlier in the 1970s: Deborah Reed-Danahay cites the work of Karl Heider,31 to which can be added that of Walter Goldschmidt.32 Each of these three scholars used the term in differently. Golsdschmidt (in his address to the American Anthropological Association in 1976) used the term to imply an entirely insular process: a report on the state of the field of ethnographic study at a time of crisis, undertaken by an ethnographer for the use of his peers.33 Heider’s work on the characteristics self identified by a group of Dani children suggests that ‘auto-ethnography’ is a collective, native account of a people’s own activity, albeit collected by an external researcher.34 Hayano expands the concept to include works in which the author writes on a group of which they ‘posses the qualities of often permanent self-identification… and full internal membership, as recognized both by themselves and the people of whom they are part’.35 Whilst Hayano’s definition is the closest to that which is currently accepted (in that he does not limit the insider status to ‘natives’ alone), both Heider and Goldschmidt serve to illustrate that the concept was already in circulation, at least amongst anthropologists. In fact Hayano’s claim to primacy is derived from having witnessed the term used by Sir Raymond Firth in 1966, who in turn was reporting its use by Bronislow Malinowski in a seminar in the 1930s, during a discussion of

30 David Hayano, ‘Auto-Ethnography: Paradigms, Problems, and Prospects’, Human Organization, 38/1 (Spring 1979), 99-104. 31 Karl G. Heider , ‘What Do People Do? Dani Auto-Ethnography.’ Journal of Anthropological Research, 31/1 (Spring, 1975), 3-17. 32 Walter Goldschmidt, ‘Anthropology and the Coming Crisis: An Autoethnographic Appraisal.’ American Anthropologist, 79/2 (1977), 293–308. 33 Goldschmidt, 1977, 197. 34 Deborah Reed-Danahay (ed.), Auto/Ethnography: rewriting the self and the social (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997), 4. 35 Reed-Danahay,1997, 5. 16 Jomo Kenyatta’s study of his own people.36 Autoethnography as a theoretical concept had clearly been at the fringes of the field for decades prior to Hayano’s publication.

Just as autoethnography-as-theory pre-exists the use of the term in print, it can also be argued that autoethnography-as-practice is considerably older than the term which now defines it. Interest in ‘native anthropologies’ and studies involving individual life stories had waned in favour of ‘scientism’ by the time of Hayano’s publication, but had played a more prominent role in earlier anthropological practice.37 1930s anthropological luminaries such as Malinowski and Boas believed the development of ‘native anthropologists’ to be both important and inevitable.38 In fact, as James Buzard asserts, native ethnographies can be traced back beyond the formalisation of anthropological discipline itself: he cites Mary L Pratt’s work on a 17th century South American history of the Inca written (in both Spanish and Quechua) as a voice of resistance against the dominant imperialist accounts of the conquering Spanish.39 By the same token, several of the 12th century proto-ethnographies by medieval chronicler and clergyman Geraldis Cambrensis (also rendered Gerald of Wales/Gerallt Gymro) such as the Itinerarium Cambriae or Descriptio Cambriae (both written in the 1190s), can be seen as essentially autoethnographic in nature. Gerald strongly identified himself as a Welshman (despite his aristocratic Norman father) and his descriptions of contemporary Welsh society and culture, whilst critical and sometimes far from complimentary, were generated from his highly subjective insider standpoint.40 Even without laying claim to such a lengthy gestation period for autoethnography, the possibility should be acknowledged that within the anthropological canon ‘there are, perhaps, many ethnographies that shelter autoethnographies within them.41 Indeed, as Buzard states:

The more one looks for the origins of autoethnography, the more they recede into the misty beginnings of the discipline now routinely censured for denying the possibility of autoethnography by “silencing the native voice”.42

Reed-Danahay highlights the emergence of two distinct traditions and definitions of autoethnography during the 1980s and into the mid 1990s, dependant on whether the ‘accent’

36 (See Reed-Danahay, 1997 (cited above), and Buzard, 2003 (cited below). The Kenyatta study in question was later published as Facing Mount Kenya in 1938. 37 Reed-Danahay, 1997. 38 James Buzard, ‘On Auto-Ethnographic Authority’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 16/1 (2003), 61-91 (66). 39 Buzard, 2003, 64. 40 Geraldis Cambrensis, (trans. Colt-Hoare), The Itinerary And Description of Wales (with an introduction by W. Llewellyn Williams) (London: J. M. Dent & Co, 1905), viii. 41 Reed-Danahay, 1997, 254. 42 Buzard, 2003, 66. 17 falls more strongly on the ethnographic or autobiographical element of the term;43 Some scholars loosely followed Hayano’s model of insider or native ethnography (wherein the scholar’s claim to authenticity and authority originate from within the studied group) whilst others placed their emphasis on autobiography (in which the personal life story of the researcher is held up as ethnographically significant in relation to the wider culture in which they situate themselves). Reed-Danahay herself suggests a useful hybrid definition:

[Auto-ethnography] synthesizes both a postmodern ethnography, in which the realist conventions and objective observer position of standard ethnography have been called into question, and a postmodern autobiography, in which the notion of the coherent, individual self has been similarly called into question.

As Reed-Danahay implies, the Postmodern era had presented a series of significant challenges to the dominant Positivist paradigm, and traditional ethnographic practice was similarly under scrutiny; the classic studies of ‘natives’ from the ‘objective’ perspective of white, able bodied, middle-to-upper class, Christian, university educated men were seen as an inherently colonialist project: another way for Europeans to represent the (usually subjugated) Other to themselves.44 Not only had such representations arisen from colonialism, they also acted to extend it by means of essentialist notions of the Other which, whilst always exotic, were firmly positioned as lesser than the rational, scientific West.45 By the mid 1980s, prior modes of representation and legitimation were in crisis.46 One of the most profound shifts in response to these crises was a characterised by Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln as the ‘narrative turn’, in which experimental writing forms re-evaluated ‘storying’ as a way of being and knowing.47 The presence and profile of autoethnographic methods within qualitative research rose dramatically from the mid 1990s, with Denzin & Lincoln’s series of Sage handbooks moving from having a single index reference to the term in the 1994, to an entire chapter on the subject in the following edition in 2000.48 The chapter in question, by Carolyn Ellis and Arthur Bochner, lays the blueprint for what now stands as ‘the dominant claim’ to the autoethnographic methodology 49. Differing slightly from Reed-Danahay, Ellis

43 Reed-Danahay, 1997, 8-9. 44 Mary L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge 1992), 2. 45 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). 46 Norman K. Denzin & Yvona S. Lincoln (eds.) Handbook of Qualitative Research (London: Sage, 2000). 47 It should be noted that their ‘narrative turn’ originates in an historical account of qualitative literature of the North American academy, but does not necessarily translate directly across other disciplines or geopolitical boundaries, nor is the characterisation of these ‘moments’ in qualitative research met with universal scholarly acceptance. 48 Sara Delamont ‘The only honest thing: autoethnography, reflexivity and small crises in fieldwork’, Ethnography and Education, 4/1 (2009), 51-63 (57). 49 Sarah Wall, ‘An autoethnography on learning about autoethnography’, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 5/2 (2006), Article 9. 18 & Bochner divide the term into three component parts: auto (personal experience), ethno (cultural experience), and graphy (analysis).50

The writing style of Ellis, Bochner and their many supporters is characterised by works written entirely in the form of present tense, first person narrative, with the intention to convey the personal subjectivity, vulnerability and emotional state of the author in that particular moment; the hope is of eliciting a similar empathic response from the reader. In their methodology, which has been retrospectively labelled ‘evocative autoethnography’, the narrative is considered to be both the process and the product of the research: the story as data, with a keen eye to the writers craft and the aesthetics of the text. This style has drawn intense criticism from more traditionally minded social scientists such as Sara Delemont, who decries the entire methodological approach as not only being both ‘literally lazy and also intellectually lazy’ but goes as far as to dismiss it as ‘almost entirely pernicious’.51

Even amongst the promoters of autoethnography themselves, there is dissent over the issue of the analytical value of the practice. In a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography given over almost entirely to the subject, Leon Anderson proposes an alternative autoethnographic methodology.52 His contention is that the dominant methodological and stylistic claim of Ellis, Bochner et al to the title of autoethnography ‘…may have the unintended consequence of eclipsing other visions of what autoethnography can be and of obscuring the ways in which it may fit productively in other traditions of social enquiry’.53 Anderson proposes to establish a new subgenre —analytic autoethnography— and sets out a list of criteria that are the key features distinguishing works of his new approach from the evocative paradigm. For Anderson, the researcher must be a ‘complete member researcher’ (CMR) of the social setting they study, must practice analytic reflexivity, must have the self clearly present and visible in an narrative they construct, must use dialogue with others apart from themselves as part of their narrative, and must set out a clear agenda to engage in analysis of their work. These proposals place his analytic approach into direct conflict with that of the evocative tradition by setting out a mutually incompatible methodology. This conflict is clearly apparent within the same journal issue, with articles both supporting and

50 Carolyn Ellis & Art Bochner, ‘Autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity: Researcher as subject’, in Norman K. Denzin & Yvonna S. Lincoln (eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research (London: Sage, 2000), 733– 68. 51 Sara Delamont, ‘Arguments against autoethnography’, Qualitative Researcher, 4 (Feb. 2007). 52 Leon Anderson, ‘Analytic Autoethnography.’ Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35/4 (2006), 373-395. 53 Anderson, 2006, 374. 19 vehemently opposing Anderson; the writing of both camps articulates a fundamental and largely irreconcilable divide at the heart of autoethnographic practice.54

Kevin Vryan offers cautious support of Anderson, but addresses one of the central incompatibilities between the analytic and evocative.55 In Anderson’s model, the researcher cannot themself be the research setting, but must be a member of a wider community or group. Taking issue with this, Vryan argues that, as the field of analytic autoethnography is still young, any attempts to limit its scope before the potential of the methodology is established would be counter productive. Proposing a broader definition of the genre, Vryan identifies the key distinction between the two styles as being the difference between explicit and implicit analysis. In allowing for both, a space is created for an autoethnography in which self-study and explicit analysis are central tenets, but which does not preclude emotive or evocative writing, and is best evaluated in terms of its usefulness in helping understand other people/experiences/contexts.

Autoethnography in Practice

I was sure that autoethnography was the most honest and open way to examine Folkworks’ impact upon folk music education practice with sufficient depth whilst still acknowledging my relationship to the subject; indeed, to absent myself from the report of research into a community of which I was a present, active member now seemed as strange as if I had decided to insert myself as a character into the write up of research into events that had happened prior to my birth. My own approach developed by taking inspiration from Leon Anderson’s commitment to situating my own subjective position as a complete member researcher within a web of dialogue with others, and Kevin Vryan’s freedom to move between implicit and explicit analysis, between inward and outward focus as the narrative dictated, so long as the overall goal was to helpfully illuminate my subject to the reader. My own experience would be woven into a larger framework of interviews with others, building up a hybrid of oral history drawn from interviews with others, action research as a tutor within the organisation and my own autoethnography. Unlike Ellis, Bochner et al, I was comfortable breaking the assumption of autoethnography-as-research method; the supposedly ‘natural’ writing style of present tense, first person narrative representing the writers stream of consciousness I find to be totally undermined by the constant inline citation: nobody thinks

54 Various authors, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35/4 (2006). 55 Kevin Vryan, ‘Expanding Analytic Autoethnography and Enhancing its Potential.’ Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35/4 (2006), 405-409. 20 with footnotes. Rather, I used it as part of the tapestry of voices I was collating to create the narrative, foregrounding my own experience as and when necessary. Essentially, I chose to include myself as one of my research subjects.

In practice, this meant interviewing myself, in the presence of a recording device. These self- interviews were deliberately relatively informal, with no script or pre-prepared list of detailed questions, just a sense of the topic to be discussed. This was how I chose to conduct interviews with others throughout the study, allowing the interviewee to make the connections that they considered to be pertinent with little direct intervention or steering from the interviewer; by dictating what information I was prepared to hear by sticking to pre- determined questions, I would have run the risk of shielding myself from the story which the interviewee wished to impart. For the purposes of this study I decided to allow myself the same courtesy; to simply talk about what came to mind and allow recurring themes and key points to be drawn from the resulting narrative during the analysis stage. I was hoping that my responses would be as natural as the circumstances would allow, and the method I found most natural was to simply talk over the events as if in the presence of an interested and patient listener. Rather than prescriptively conducting one self-interview per week, I recorded whenever I felt I had something to say, think about or work through. Whenever possible, I would attempt to conduct self-interviews the day after whatever event had triggered the need for the recording session.

In terms of preparing both the interview space and myself, I acted exactly as if I had been interviewing anybody else. I used the same recording device as I had for all the other interviews I had conducted — an Edirol R09, borrowed from the L&P department at the Sage Gateshead—and took the same notebook and pens into the room. I made sure that I had a freshly brewed cup of tea or coffee to hand, and that I was in a comfortable position before starting to record. I began by stating the time, date and location for the benefit of the tape, just as I would in any other interview. These elements of ritualisation became part of the process by which I entered the mentality necessary to spend the best part of an hour in conversation with myself: it had to feel like an interview was taking place. The setting was important in terms of making myself feel relaxed enough to give a relatively natural account to the tape. The first and most important requirement was total privacy. I was never quite at ease with the nagging feeling that talking to myself, especially for such extended periods, was an extremely eccentric behaviour and thus the thought of being overheard made relaxing into the task

21 almost impossible for me. For this reason, I either made the recording in my own living room, or booked a lockable room at the university music studios.

Despite this, I was surprised by how easy I found it to just talk about my experiences without any kind of prompting. The recordings mostly lasted between forty-five minutes and an hour, and contained relatively few long pauses or digressions into the irrelevant. I was also surprised by how effectively the act of speaking my thoughts aloud brought forgotten memories to light. Listening back to the recordings proved very revealing of my emotional reactions, in ways that I had not been aware of in the moment. Where I had thought I was giving a reasonably fair and balanced account of events as I had experienced them, the way I had chosen to describe them often betrayed far more emotive language than I had expected. If talking over an incident that irritated me, for instance, my sentences became shorter, my turn of phrase more negative and dismissive. Similarly, it was quite clear when I was impressed, pleased or intrigued simply from the vocabulary, tone and delivery revealed in the recording; the distance from the recordings revealed nuance, light and shade in my own experience that I was not party to at the time. The recordings also revealed that I never completely lost my sense that the undertaking was slightly ridiculous. There were occasional comments and asides, addressed as if to a third party, that let slip my unease. Usually these took the form of complaints about the noise of building work or instrumental practice in the vicinity. It seems as if these comments were for the benefit of my future self, listening back to the recordings some months later. It felt as if they were meant to be reassuring, acknowledging the fact that I was talking to myself by literally talking to myself.

Analysis of the interviews was deliberately left until much later. Having carried out a ‘dummy run’ of an autoethnographic piece, the experience prompted me to make sure that I had a significant distance between making the recording and listening back to it. I had transcribed the entirety of my first attempt the day after the recording, and found my familiarity with what was being said to be a hindrance; in fact, my transcription was uncharacteristically inaccurate, and my attention wandered frequently. I had known before I started recording that I would be making a transcription of it the following day, and it was clear from the way I spoke to the tape that this was on my mind during the recording itself. I found myself leaving instructions on how to write it up, and the whole narrative had a formal feel as if spoken to an audience, rather than a single listener. In an effort to avoid this, I decided to write up summaries of each self-interview session rather than making complete transcriptions, only

22 pulling out direct quotes if they seemed of particular interest or utility, and to do so several months after the recording if possible.

Autoethnography allowed for diverse research approaches to be mingled in a single chapter’s narrative without having to pause and describe each individual component as it occurred in the text. Whether these were the elements of oral history and ethnography that were used to build up a history of Folkworks’s practice, the observational fieldwork at Folkworks events, the action research of teaching and participating within the organization I was studying, or the more standard historical practices of assembling information from press written accounts, the overall autoethnographic lens of the last chapter was the unifying viewpoint which brought the narrative together. It will be clear if you have read this far that I considered making the areas of the thesis in which I was an active participant clear to the reader to be a matter of ethical necessity, and autoethnography was the method best suited to allowing that openness to feature as an integral part of the narrative.

Methodologies in Contrast

The historical method has considerable strengths, not least of which is the long established pedigree of the method. For many scholars, the historical method is synonymous with historical research itself. Histories written through the historical method often present an approach, style and tone which is familiar to the reader as part of extant historical canon; this lends them an air or legitimacy and credibility through association with this most traditional mode of historical representation. More recent, experimental or fringe modes of enquiry can present a challenge to the dominance of the historical method but, without claim to a similar legacy, must spend more time justifying their approach to the reader. This longevity of the historical approach to research is no accident, of course, but the result of generations of successful scholarly endeavor: the method has been proven to work, and has produced much of our useful historical analysis for many years. With the careful assessment of written documentation at its absolute foundation, historical methods typically allow for great precision in matters such as dating, locating and attributing of historical moments, and this in turn provides a stable basis for construction of historical narratives. 56

Autoethnography shows us a very different vantage point. Rather than relying on sources that tell us what happened after-the-fact, it allows us to see events from a close observer’s

56 Tosh, 2002, 56. 23 perspective: an insider with an eye to contemporary academic analysis of events as they are unfolding. It allows the author’s membership of a particular community to act as the key into a research world that would otherwise be denied by the positivist social science tradition’s fear of familiarity. That same familiarity is both the lens through which the research is viewed, and the shibboleth that confirms the authenticity of the studied experience to the reader. For the future reader, an autoethnographic study exists in a productive space between the traditional division of primary and secondary sources, with the eye-witness testimony of the former inextricably interwoven with the retrospective analysis of the latter. Autoethnography has also found a particular niche in being used to articulate complex and fluid power relations that go beyond traditional binary oppositions, such as ‘us’ and ‘them’, or ‘emic’ and ‘etic’, establishing counter narratives that can offer a more nuanced interpretation of interactions between individuals.57 A researcher carries their life experience with them, and cannot simply set aside the particularities of their individual existence for the duration of a study; they are always-already embodied, sexuate, gendered beings with complex interactions of ethnic, linguistic, political and social positionalities to enact, and autoethnography offers a means to negotiate these complex, intersectional issues within a research framework.58

Rather than trying to establish which of these methodologies would be theoretically superior in an imaginary, context-and-consequence-free research vacuum, I applied whichever seemed most appropriate to the research task at hand: the first chapter could no more have been written autoethnographically than the last chapter could have been written through a purely historical methodology. If we accept that both the nature of the evidence available and the perspective of the researcher are an inherent component of the histories we can write, then the methodology(s) we choose to further our investigation must take into account the particular nature of the investigation. As scholars, we are not dogmatically limited to a single research paradigm unless we choose to be, and can decide and even design the tool we wish to use to accomplish any given task. In discussing the tendency amongst qualitative analysts to pull together a close-knit collection of different practices in order to tackle their research problem, Denzin and Lincoln use the image of a methodological ‘bricolage’, with the implication of the researcher-as-bricoleur. 59 The French word bricoleur is usually translated into English as handyman, but it lacks the underlying implication of amateurism present in the anglicized rendition: a bricoleuse is a professional, not a hobbyist. If we use the analogy of a conceptual

57 William G. Tierney,‘Life History’s History: Subjects Foretold’, Qualitative Inquiry, 4 (1998), 49-70 (66). 58 F. W. Ngunjiri, K. C. Hernandez & H. Chang, ‘Living autoethnography: Connecting life and research [Editorial]’, Journal of Research Practice, 6/1 (2010), Article E1, 6-7. 59 Denzin and Lincoln, 1998, 3-4. 24 toolbox of methodology being available to us as bricoleurs, then we should select our tools as responsibly as any other profession would do; you would use a hammer if you needed to drive a nail home, but choose a screwdriver to fix a screw. To stretch the analogy further, whilst you could use a hammer to batter a screw into place if you were so inclined— it would probably even work after a fashion— the results would be ugly and inefficient, leaving ragged and unfinished edges. The methodological bricolage I assembled during the researching and writing of this thesis forms the underpinnings of the narratives.

Thesis Parameters

This thesis is concerned with the ways in which folk music has been taught in institutionalised or formal settings, and does not include an examination of traditional learning practices. Whilst there are still a few prominent folk musicians who learned directly from the older players within their tradition—such as Alistair Anderson’s connection with piper Billy Pigg or Shetland Fiddler Catriona MacDonald’s studying under Tom Anderson—in general terms it is highly unlikely for ’s beginner players to, for instance, venture up into the hills to learn tunes from an elderly shepherd (although in Alistair Anderson’s youth he was able to do just that). Traditional learning in the twenty first century is most likely to occur within the immediate family of the player, or perhaps from family friends; however they come about, these settings will be informal, and are not part of the remit of this thesis. However, for those who are not born into a family or social grouping for whom folk music forms a part of their cultural activity, there are several other routes into folk.

The first option is that the players will teach themselves: an approach which is more likely to be successful if they are already a competent performer in a different genre of music, thus beginning with a set of transferable skills as a basis to work from. Just as with popular music, there is a folk tuition industry in place to serve these players, with ranges of tutor books for different ability levels available for all but the most obscure instruments, and a comparable but smaller selection of instructional DVDs by well-known players. The Internet, although mired with misinformation, half truth and misapprehension which is difficult to identify and avoid from a beginner standpoint—the World Wide Web has no editor in chief—provides a number of useful contact points for the would be folk musician. Dedicated instrument or repertoire specific forums, discussion groups, and individuals or organisations uploading tuition content to video sharing sites are all useful tools for assisting in learning, as are music

25 streaming and sales sites when recordings of repertoire are required. The current research by Sheffield University’s Digital Folk project will shed further light on this aspect of folk music participation once their findings are published, but a study of self-directed learning is not within the remit of this thesis.

The second option is for the aspiring folk musician to pay for professional tuition. This may simply be employing a private tutor, which can be in person or over video calling software such as Skype. A series of linked, progressive beginners workshops running daily during the course of a week long folk festival (such as Sidmouth Folk Week) can act as a good primer before further self directed tuition, and the cost of participation is often included in the overall ticket price. A residential course, such as the beginner friendly Burwell Bash in Cambridgeshire, or the Folkworks’ Summer Schools in Durham for more advanced players, can provide a time efficient way of gaining intensive tuition as part of a holiday. Alternatively, if regular local weekly classes or weekend workshops are available in the potential student’s vicinity, then the stability and regularity of these options can provide a good grounding in folk music.

Thirdly, folk music may form part of their school experience. Whilst the inclusion of folk is by no means guaranteed, either by the national curriculum or the exam boards, some individual schools still maintain a tradition of using folk music as part of their music teaching, although this will often depend on having access to staff with a competency in folk music. In addition, a number of folk music development agencies operate regionally and nationally within the UK, offering their expertise to schools as external suppliers. From Wren Music and Folk Southwest in and , to the Stockport’s Fosbrooks Folk Education Trust in the North West, and from Newcastle’s Folkworks projects in the North East, down to the English and Song Society (EFDSS) in London, certain areas have greater access to high quality professional folk music tuition than others. Of course, players can—and frequently do—combine any and all of these approaches in their personal learning journey, but it is only those that interact with folk education bodies that are of concern to this research.

From the moment of institutionalisation, the necessity arises for a considered approach to folk music tuition, which in turn raises a number of fundamental questions: What material will be taught? Who by? How will they teach it? In addition to these more practical considerations, there are larger issues: the ideological standpoints, conceptual frameworks and overarching aims of teaching folk music. These concepts are often determined by the prevailing

26 philosophies of the wider folk movement at the time, and can have far reaching impact on the way an entire generation teaches and learns folk music. By creating a detailed historical account of the successive waves of major pedagogical change within the field over time, this research aims to establish how these larger questions have been addressed in the past and, by tracing the lines of continuity between different eras, show the ways in which these educational legacies have interacted with one another. Such questions would include:

1: What did practitioners of the time consider the true nature and role of folk music to be?

2: Did they believe that folk music should be taught in schools, and if so, how should this be done?

3: How did their perceptions of the nature of folk music feed into the ways in which they believed it should be taught?

4: What was the educational significance of folk music believed to be?

Each chapter of the thesis looks at a different era in the history of folk music education, examining the ways in which the issues above were negotiated in that specific time period, with reference to both the internal views, conflicts and actions of those within the movement enacting change, and external factors such as the wider political climate, developments in technology, the changing nature of music consumption and differing public expectations surrounding music participation. The methods and resources used vary according to the nature of the subject, and are detailed accordingly in each chapter.

As these movements are often driven by the work of significant individuals, one of the ways this has been achieved is through re-assessing the lives and careers of key figures from within each period. For some, such as the pre-eminent figure of the first revival, Cecil Sharp, the ongoing legacy of his work as undoubtedly the most prolific collector and publisher of folk song in England has eclipsed the fact that in his own time he was also a significant and influential teacher and educational theorist, rising to the rank of HM Inspector of Schools within the mainstream educational establishment. Compiling a new biographical overview, foregrounding Sharp’s educational career rather than focusing on his role as a collector, was central to the assessment of his theoretical approaches to folk music tuition. In the case of

27 Alistair Anderson, musician, and founder of Folkworks, no prior academic assessment of either his formative musical or professional experiences exists, and thus the narrative is established through interview and contemporary documentation, contextualising his impact on folk music education within his personal viewpoint of the ways in which the approaches of the contemporary scene were flawed.

Teaching materials and guides to teaching methodology are also excellent sources of data, as is a notable lack of them; that Sharp produced an unprecedented number of school orientated publications was central to his educational beliefs, but by the same token the relative paucity of materials from Mary Neal and her associates was a significant indicator of their opposition to Sharp’s proposed schools strategy: an avowed exponent of aural transmission would contradict themselves by publishing songbooks. The BBC produced a huge amount of published content to accompany their radio broadcasts into schools, and with so little of their school programming recorded in the archives, the booklets were to provide the most consistently reliable resource for assessing the way in which the BBC used folk music as an educational tool. The second revival produced relatively little in the way of printed educational material, which reflected a wider return to aurality: songs were considered better learned from recordings than books.

Thesis Overview

The first section examines the interests, ideological stances and cultural assumptions that underpinned the beginnings of the , focusing mainly on the events and individuals driving developments in southern England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Published collections of folk song are used to trace the changes in scholarly focus and public interest, tracking the change from the emphasis on folk song-as-poetry that characterised the work of the early antiquarian collectors of the 18th century (for whom folk song was an archaic curio to be gleaned from manuscript sources) to the drive to collect songs directly from the oral tradition and the growing market for publications of parlour song that came to the fore at the turn of the 19th century. Alongside the developments in collecting and disseminating folk song, this section explores the European origins of the terms and theoretical concepts used in the study of folk music, and the changes wrought to them by time and translation, outlining the framework of beliefs and prejudices that came to surround the concepts of folk and tradition by the start of the 20th century, and the consequences of these notions for both the nascent revival itself and the formation of the early pedagogical stances

28 that developed as the need for formal methods of folk music tuition arose. In particular, the initial collaboration and later discord between two key figures is discussed: Cecil Sharp and Mary Neal.

This leads to a critical re-assessment of the Sharp/Neal conflict as being primarily concerned with the establishment of a suitable pedagogical nature for the revival, distinct from extant studies that characterise their opposition as concerning either ideological standpoints or bids for control and influence within the movement. The careers, agendas and allies of both Neal and Sharp in turn are examined through this lens. In Neal’s case, her background as a missionary, social worker and political activist led her towards a model for folk music tuition that focused on the enjoyment and empowerment of the individual participant, emphasising peer-to-peer informal approaches to learning. Sharp’s work in the field of folk song and dance collecting has been well documented, and his achievements in this regard have often overshadowed his previous work in the education sector; his career as a schoolteacher and choirmaster is examined to shed light on the influences that led to his insistence that folk music should be taught formally in schools by specially trained staff, with an emphasis on maintaining strict aesthetic standards through published resources. The diverging ideals of these two radically different conceptions of what folk education should entail came to be define themselves against one another, leading to an increasing embittered polarisation of their positions before the outbreak of the First World War brought about Sharp’s eventual victory. As both camps had developed their stances in opposition to one another, they had adopted increasingly extreme positions, and with Sharp’s view unopposed after the war, his deeply authoritarian and prescriptive methodology came to dominate; an assessment of the ongoing consequences that this one sided approach held for folk revivalism and education forms the end of the first section.

The second chapter concerns two significant developments of the inter-war period, both of which created new possibilities for folk music education: changes in competitive folk music practice, and the influence of the BBC schools broadcasts, particularly the long running show Singing Together. Both competitive music festivals and the school programming were highly recommended by an influential and ultimately prescient education report in 1933: The Cambridgeshire Report on the Teaching of Music. Although competition had been a feature of folk music culture for many years, especially in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the , there had also been periods of revival for each tradition. The Welsh Eisteddfodau had been re-established in the 1880s as a focus for the celebration of Welsh

29 language and culture, be it poetry, art or music. In Scotland, the rise of romantic nationalism in the wake of the defeat of the Jacobite cause at Culloden led to an earlier revival of bagpipe competitions in the Highlands, with the modern movement beginning in the 1780s. Bagpipe competitions was not confined to Scotland, however, as efforts were made from the 1880s onwards to revive the playing of the Northumbrian Small Pipes in ; after several false starts, the Northumbrian Piper’s Society was established in 1928. Attempts at competition revival in Ireland did not consolidate at a national level until later, despite localised regional initiatives: the organisation Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Êireann was formed in 1951, with one of the main outcomes being the now annual All Ireland Music Championships. These movements are contrasted with an English development in competitive music festivals; devised by Mary Wakefield, these new festivals attempted to overcome the inherent animosities of participants competing against one another by imposing an overarching common goal: the performance of a ‘great work’ of choral music, in which all competitors would collaborate. The ways in which this movement interacted with the first folk revival, and the contrasts with the prior traditional competition settings are explored, and the potential that this new model showed for later folk music education is examined.

The next section examines how the rapid development of wireless broadcasting after the war, and the resultant complications surrounding attempts to regulate and license this new technology, led to the formation of the British Broadcasting Company: an organisation with a profound sense of its duty to educate as well as entertain. The unique position of holding a state sponsored nationwide monopoly on wireless programming facilitated the largely unhindered development of a radio education curriculum without the inconvenience of commercial consideration; the Corporation’s pioneering experiments with music education broadcasting are detailed, as are the beliefs that underpinned them. An in depth exploration follows of the role of folk music in the almost haphazard creation of the show Singing Together, commissioned in response to the mass evacuation of children at the outset of the Second World War. The show’s unanticipated nationwide popularity led to almost six decades on air, in which folk song was to feature heavily. Through a detailed examination of the booklets issued to accompany the show, a decade-by-decade account of the relative prominence of folk song within the overall programme content is established. The final analysis makes the case that Singing Together should be considered the largest folk song education effort ever attempted within the UK: a status which has hitherto gone unrecognised. With significant archival absences a major obstacle to further data gathering,

30 the chapter concludes by discussing the potential reach and impact of such a long running show.

The post-war second revival saw far reaching changes to the underlying ideologies of the British folk scene, as the influence of radical leftwing politics took hold. With folk song now conceptually aligned with the cause of the working class, it was now considered both possible and desirable to write new folk music in response to the ongoing political climate. Strongly influenced by, and interconnected with, the similar movement in the USA, a new wave of collecting and disseminated folk song was also initiated, with a focus on the urban and industrial legacies ignored by the first revival. The shift in emphasis away from written resources due to the growing recording industry, and the demand for increasing amateur musical participation that followed the craze of the late 1950s are examined, as both were to have profound impact on the public’s expectations of the ongoing revival movement. The backlash against this new have-a-go attitude, as personified by the activities of Ewan MacColl and the Critics Group are also discussed, as their thinking would go on to have a significant influence on later teaching practice.

The changing attitudes to folk music education, and how they reflected the developments in the wider folk scene, are explored by a close reading of the most significant education focused publication of the second revival: 1978’s Folk Music In School. A thematic breakdown of the major concepts employed throughout the book follows, establishing a vision for folk music education that differs significantly from the Sharpean Orthodoxy that had dominated the first half of the century. The chapter concludes by examining how these new approaches had significant parallels with the Nealite ideals that had challenged Sharp’s doctrine in the first revival, amounting to a near complete reversal of pedagogical stance from the first to second revivals.

The last section details the foundation and expansion of the folk arts development agency Folkworks in the North East of England during the late 1980s. Beginning with an account of the personal and professional musical influences of the organisation’s founding artistic director, Alistair Anderson, this chapter examines the factors that led him to form his vision for folk music education. Constructed from in-depth interviews and contemporary written sources, the section discusses the landscape of the folk education scene at the time, and Anderson’s drive to develop a new way to spread his own enthusiasm for folk music, by using the top performers of the day as the tutors to inspire a new generation. The second half of this

31 chapter details my own involvement with Folkworks, starting from before I took on this Ph.D. Through observations and interviews, the section details the ways in which Folkworks managed to synthesise the most effective elements of the prior approaches into a hitherto unseen combined approach—the ‘Twin Track’—that was tailored to suit the changing music scene in which they were operating. Importantly for broader folk music education movement, Folkworks presented a viable resolution to the Sharp/Neal conflict, effectively re-unifying the two approaches that had divided the practice for over eighty years.

32

1. Folk Music Education: An Untold Story

Despite more than a century having passed since the first folk revival began in earnest, little effort has yet been made to create a systematic account of how the material has been transmitted. A full, detailed, chronological account is beyond the scope of this chapter so what is attempted is a charting of the dominant pedagogical approaches focused in England since the first revival, and touching on the rest of the British Isles when and where the influences begin to overlap. My focus is on how traditional music forms became formalised in education settings, and an examination of the factors that brought about this moment of institutionalisation. It is from this moment, which can be traced to its beginnings in 1905, that the need for structured pedagogical thought arises. The slow gathering of momentum towards revival, as material was collected and published, will be examined briefly, but the focus will be on the revival from when it became a national movement.

In the early years of the 20th century, leading up to the Great War, a schism arose between two groups of folk revivalists; the main protagonists were former friends and collaborators, both seen as leading lights in the campaign to bring the traditions of England back to a position of prominence. On one side was Cecil J Sharp: folk song collector, author, teacher and schools inspector. On the other, Mary Neal: missionary, philanthropist, fundraiser and feminist. The site of their conflict was the newly revived . Both camps maintained that the other would cause significant damage to the tradition if their actions were left unchecked. The implications of the debate were much wider, and the outcome of their dispute was to have a significant and lasting impact on the teaching of folk music.

The late Roy Judge examined the conflict, in terms of the interpersonal struggles of the main protagonists, in exhaustive detail.1 His blow-by-blow chronological account was adapted from a presentation he gave to the Folklore Society in the style of a game show, highlighting the point scoring and often petty one-upmanship of the two sides.2 He details the technical aspects of their arguments, the key strategic moves (such as control of the Stratford upon Avon Festival as a teaching base), the personality clashes and the power struggles. I believe there is scope, however, to recast the conflict as a struggle to establish the dominant pedagogical approach for the fledgling revival, with Sharp’s victory determining the course of

1 Roy Judge, ‘Mary Neal and the Espérance Morris’, Folk Music Journal, 5/5 (1989), 545-591. 2 Ibid, 545. 33 formalised folk music tuition for decades afterwards, and Neal’s approach being driven to the fringes. The complicating factor is that it was primarily the dance traditions that were fought over, and the parallels with music are not always clear-cut, or fully worked through.

It is important to bear in mind that, at the time of this debate, Morris dancing was not the preserve of a minority interest group as it is today. Since the late 18th century, the romantic notion of the ‘pure, simple and uncorrupted peasantry’ had steadily taken hold across Europe.3 The aim was rediscover elements of the national character through the folklore, music, dance and vernacular speech of the unlettered classes. This was in keeping with the contemporary trend of Nationalist thought. The concept of nationhood in its modern understanding, as a geographical area unified by political, cultural and linguistic ties, in contradistinction to other such entities, had only become viable through the advent of mass media and education. For either to work, it was necessary to implement the standardisation of language away from regional dialect toward a national norm, allowing for greater ease of communication between individual communities.4 The distribution of the first national newspapers and advances in public transport networks allowed meaningful debates to enter the public consciousness on a countrywide scale. The dawn of mass political movements made debates surrounding ‘the national question’ during and after the 1880s all the more pertinent, as national slogans could be used to garner support and votes.5 In Britain, the awareness of such issues was acute, due to several culturally distinct groups attempting to establish their own credentials for nationhood in close proximity, not least through what was euphemistically termed ‘the Irish Question’.6 Romantic Scots nationalism had played a pivotal role in the formation of the concept of cultural nationalism, as the highlander was held up as Europe’s own ‘noble savage’, the ‘conceptual bridge’ between the idealised rural, primitive past and the modern civilisations of the western world.7 Notions such as this, which legitimised a modern nation-state by creating ties with a semi mythical past, were to foreground the efforts of the folk revival in public debate. An indication of the exposure the

3 E. J. Hobsbawn, Nations and nationalism since 1780: programme, myth, reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 103. 4 Ibid,10. 5 Ibid, 43. 6 Idem. 7 Matthew Gelbart, The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music”: emerging categories from Ossian to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 10-11. 34 cause received is that Neal was able to publish an article on the revival of folk song in the pages of Vanity Fair, and performances by her dancers were reviewed in the Times.8

1.1 The Groundwork of Revival

The catalysts for the evolution of folk song studies were works of purportedly ancient poetry: James Macpherson’s various Ossian publications of the mid 1760s (published in two volume compendium form as The works of Ossian, the Son of Fingal in 1765).9 Macpherson claimed to have a collection of ancient Gaelic manuscripts recalling the great deeds of the hero Fingal, from which he had translated the poetry of the great and hitherto forgotten Scottish Ossian, rendering the English version into verse.10 A controversial work, it proved to be internationally popular, and was translated into several European languages. A German language edition of Ossian found its way into the hands of a Prussian born Lutheran pastor named Johann Gottfried Herder.

Herder (1744 – 1803) was a literary critic, a theologian and a philosopher. Well-travelled and highly educated, in part through his vocation as a preacher, he had studied under Kant and later became a mentor to Goethe. In Ossian, Herder felt he had discovered a vital truth and purity of Scottish expression, the resultant theorizing about the nature of ancient poetry leading to the coining of the word Volkslied (folk-song), and facilitating the birth of folk-song study. His thoughts were set out in an article entitled Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker (Extracts from a correspondence about Ossian and the songs of ancient peoples) which he published in 1773. The same year also saw the publication of Voices of the Peoples in Their Songs (Stimmen der Völker in Ihren Liedern): a collection of folksongs from all over Europe compiled by Herder (mostly from manuscript sources).

8 Both are quoted in Judge, 1989, and the full citations appear in the endnotes on page 586. The Vanity Fair article appeared on 14/04/1910 (see Judge’s footnote 109) and the Times’ review on 07/05/1910 (see Judge’s footnote 115). 9James Macpherson & Howard Gaskill (ed.), The Poems of Ossian and Related Works (: Edinburgh University Press, 1996). NB: this is a modern composite edition based on the 1776 iteration, with additional scholarly input from the editor. 10 Debate as to how much, if any, of MacPherson’s Ossian actually came from ancient sources is beyond the scope of this thesis. Herder believed them to be genuine, and this influenced his thinking accordingly. That said, the authenticity of the work was repeatedly questioned even in Macpherson and Herder’s own lifetimes (not least by Samuel Johnson), and continued into the 19th and 20th centuries. Wilson simply dismisses the entire work as fraudulent. See Wilson, 1973, 827 (cited in full below). 35 Das Volk was the central concept around which Herder built his theory. Each Volk was formed of people who shared both a common language (or closely related dialects) and a common regional history, the interaction of which over time lead organically to a unique set of shared cultural values and expressions.11 These factors, collectively, formed the distinctive spirit or soul of that particular people — the Volksgeist. This Volksgeist demonstrated an inherent natural continuity, a pathway leading from the past, and stretching forward into the future. To deviate from this course by imitating or adopting that of another Volk was thus inherently and catastrophically un-natural, leading to, in W A Wilson’s words “…the stultification of native cultural forms and ultimately to the death of the nation itself”.12As an extension of this belief, the destiny of each individual was best met by their serving the development of their parent Volk.

One expression of the Volksgeist which could be traced and studied was the repertoire of ‘Volkslieder’, a term which would be rendered into English a century later as ‘folk-songs’.13 Herder’s interest was captured by the poetry of the song’s text, rather than the melodic or content of the piece, and in consequence he writes of the creators of these Volkslieder as folk poets, rather than folk singers. For Herder, folk poets were the embodying mouthpieces of this collective consciousness, speaking both for and as the character of their own people, and thus this ancient, primitive poetry contained the distilled essence of the Volk. Unlike later theorists, Herder saw no need for the author of a folk song to be anonymous, nor did he advocate a communal origin: in Herder’s view, both Shakespeare and Homer had given voice to their respective Volksgeist in their time.14

The exact meaning of ‘Volk’ is problematic for a number of reasons, not least of which are the subtle shifts of meaning that come with translation. Suitable equivalents in English often carry associations that are not necessarily inherent in Herder’s original usage: ‘Nation’ implies the presence of a state, ‘Tribe’ carries connotations of the primitive, ‘Race’ brings with it the question of ethnicity etc. Herder’s Volk are groupings of people, regardless of social class, brought together through interlinked cultural, historical and linguistic commonalities. It should be stressed in light of later interpretations that he did not suggest

11 William A. Wilson, ‘Herder, Folklore and Romantic Nationalism’. The Journal of Popular Culture, 6/4 (1973) 819–835 (822-823). 12 Ibid, 823. 13 Exactly when the term came into widespread use in English is somewhat convoluted and hard to pin down, but it was certainly in use in print by 1888. (see Wilgus, 1959, 5, and Section 1.2 of this thesis) 14 Wilson, 1973, 826. 36 that such characteristics are inherently ethnic, or even subscribe to a concept of race.15 Writing long before the unification of Germany in the 1870s, he does not correlate Volk with the concept of a Nation State, and expressly opposes the advancement one group over and above their neighbors by military means.16 Indeed, as each unique Volk can only assess itself, and can only do so by its own unique criteria, there can be no concept of any one grouping being comparatively better or worse than any other. Nevertheless, as later thinkers took up Herder’s ideas in the 19th and 20th centuries, they were to become inextricably associated with colonial expansionism and racial supremacy.

Herder’s legacy, in terms of his impact on British , is difficult to trace. Just as with his work on meaning and language, his thoughts on folk song became so ubiquitous in European discourse that they became detached from their originator. By the time Herderian ideas entered British thinking, despite the hugely influential impact of his theories, their author was all but unknown. Herder was, in the words of Philip Bohlman “… subject to the paradox of invisibility growing from historical overexposure.”.17

1.2 19th Century Collections: from Scholar to Singer

From the mid 18th century into the 19th, there was a marked increase in public interest in folk song in Britain. The broadening appetite for such material, and the changing nature of the role it was published to fulfill, can be traced in part through the corresponding changes in published collections. The initial wave of collections, largely gathered from printed sources and providing only the text, were intended as repositories of poetry, collated for reference and academic study. Throughout the 19th century, there was a steady shift towards collections gathered from oral sources and supplied with musical notation, published with the intention of the songs they contained being learned and performed.

Initial interest in collecting the material that would later be termed folk music was purely antiquarian in nature — these songs, texts and tunes were curios of a bygone era, to be collected for the sake of their age. Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, first published in 1764, is an early and influential example of this type of collection. The texts

15 Michael Forster, ‘Johann Gottfried von Herder’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). 16 Forster, 2008. 17 Philip V. Bohlman, ‘Herder's Nineteenth Century’. Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 7 (2010), 3-21. 37 were taken in part from hand written folios in the Bishop’s collection, but also from Broadside sources such as those collected by (now held at Magdalen College, Cambridge). Percy was only interested in the texts of these songs as examples of early poetic endeavour, and made no attempt to include appropriate melodies for their performance. His intent was to display a thread of continuity between ancient Bardic and traditions and the poetry of his present day. The three volumes of the Reliques… were to provide inspiration to later poets such as Scott, Coleridge and Wordsworth, and provide a template for later Romantic Nationalist verse.18

There are no surviving published collections with full musical notation that pre-date Percy’s effort. Perhaps the earliest example, in England at least, came from the North East; the publication (around 1800) of A Favourite Collection of Tunes, with Variations, adapted for the Northumberland Small Pipes, , or marked an attempt to preserve the musical heritage of the region. It reputedly contained music from the repertoire of one John Peacock, the last surviving member of Newcastle City Waits.19 Other collections from the region in the early 19th century followed the more typical antiquarian style; 1812 saw the noted bibliophile John Bell’s publication of ballad texts from the region, for example, but these were mostly taken from printed broadside sources. Bell was one of the founder members of the Society for Antiquaries of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which would go on to play an instrumental role in preserving handwritten manuscripts containing the repertoires of local musicians.

Perhaps the most notable early exception to the antiquarian trend was the Northamptonshire poet John Clare.20 We know from his papers that he was actively collecting in the 1820s, and was doing so with the eventual intent of publishing his findings.21 In the event, only a half dozen of the songs made it into any sort of publication by his own estimation, and they have yet to surface, but his papers hold over two hundred tunes and songs. Clare was a player and played an active part in the music of his home village of Helpston, the area from which he collected, but we know nothing more of where his fiddle tunes came from, as he did not note down any details of his sources. Many of the songs he noted were taken down from

18 Cecil J. Sharp, English Folk-song: Some Conclusions (Wakefield: EP Publishing, 1972), 170. Scott also cited the collection as an inspiration to collect ballad texts from the oral tradition in Scotland, and publish them in his own three-volume collection, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in 1802/03. 19 J. Collingwood Bruce & John Stokoe (eds.), Northumbrian Minstrelsy: A Collection of the , Melodies and Small-pipe Tunes of (Newcastle: Society for Antiquaries of Newcastle, 1882). Bruce & Stokoe cited Peacock’s Tunes as a key influence. 20 George Deacon, John Clare and the Folk Tradition (London: Sinclair Bown, 1983). 21 Deacon, 1983, 6. The papers and notebooks are held partially in Northampton Central Library, and partially in Peterborough museum. Deacon complains about their poor condition, noting that Clare’s home-made ink has often eaten through the pages. 38 his parent’s singing (especially his father), and others he wrote down from his own memory. As a participant of the musical community that provided his sources, his criteria for collecting were somewhat less stringent than later collectors. He collected the tunes that he liked from those in circulation within his own oral tradition, with no thought for whether they were ‘folk’ or not (the word folk song was not yet in use in English), thus occasional melodies by Mozart, Bach, Handel and Haydn can be found amongst the and reels, and printed broadside texts appear amongst his songs. He saw no issue in altering the texts of the songs, or to adapting them into his poetry.

In this regard, Clare represents a link to an older attitude, predating the growing schism between art and folk music. As Matthew Gelbart argues, the two genres only acquire meaningful significance in the later eighteenth century, and then only in contradistinction to one another.22 As the two terms have evolved in tandem, they have come to define themselves by the negative other. The importance of the oral, communal source of folk music is made plain by being placed in opposition to art music’s notated score by a named composer. Folksong collectors in the later 19th and early 20th centuries would increasingly place emphasis on orality as being analogous to authenticity, but Clare appears to have made no such distinction. Had he not suffered from lengthy bouts of mental illness, Clare could have been amongst the first to publish music that was collected from oral sources and disseminated for public use. It should be noted that for musicians such as Clare to keep a written record own their own tunes and songs was not unusual in that time, nor indeed for some time before and after. There are numerous surviving handwritten manuscripts from the 18th and 19th centuries, in which the repertoire of a named individual, family or collective are recorded. What marks Clare’s attempts as being unique is not that he wrote down what he heard and played in his own community of peer musicians, but that he believed it worthy of publication for wider attention.

Although such practice was still rare in the era of predominant antiquarian interest, Clare was not entirely alone in collecting material from the oral tradition for publication, and the two approaches co-existed on relatively equal terms during the mid-century. Two collections of West Country Christmas carols —the first by Gilbert Davis in 1822, the second by William Sandys in 1833— provide a good point of example of the two different approaches almost side by side, being from the same locale, relatively contemporaneous and containing similar material. In the earlier work, Davis included settings of eight carols ‘noted as sung, without

22 Gelbart, 2007. 39 emendation’, as well as a transcript of an extract from a local mummers play, and descriptions of other traditions surrounding the included content.23 By contrast, Sandys chose to focus largely on manuscript sources from the 15th to 17th centuries, and did not provide melodies for the majority of the texts.24

Elsewhere in the country, attempts were also being made to record regional repertoires. The Society for Antiquaries of Newcastle-upon-Tyne began collecting ‘Ballads, Melodies and Small-Pipe Tunes of Northumbria’ in 1855, but suffered numerous setbacks, with the deaths of some prominent committee members, and the difficulty of obtaining material from the oral tradition delaying publication of their findings until 1882. Despite expressing their regret that ‘the inquiry was being made half a century too late’, Bruce and Stokoe’s Northumbrian Minstrelsy stands as an important record of a regionally specific repertoire.25

The publication of Introduction To The Study Of National , appearing in 1866 from the pen of the German musicologist Carl Engel, was a pivotal moment in the study of folk song, as it was the first serious English language attempt to create a comparative basis for the study of national song: the author was convinced of the necessity of such an undertaking for any nation to truly come to know itself. It was through this work, Dean-Smith asserts, that such Herderian thought finally took hold in British folk song study, albeit in a somewhat altered form.26 Whilst Engel made extensive use of Herder’s ideas, no direct reference is made to Herder himself, instead referring to his ideas as generically German concepts.27 Engel also chose to translate the German ‘Volksleid’ as ‘National Song’, believing an anglicised rendition of ‘folk-song’ was ‘inadmissible’28; he also variously chose ‘people,’ ‘race’ or ‘tribe’ as collective nouns to stand in place of ‘das Volk’: later confusion as to the boundaries of folk and national song (see section 1.5 below) can be said to stem from these decisions. Engel held that song texts, studied as national poetry, had hitherto received greater attention than the music itself simply because the specialist skills of a musician were necessary to effectively assess the latter.29 Whilst admitting that the range and scope of human emotion

23 Margaret Dean-Smith & English Folk Dance and Song Society A guide to English folk song collections 1822- 1952 with an index to their contents, historical annotations and an introduction (Liverpool: University Press of Liverpool in assoc. with the English Folk Dance and Song Society, 1954), 25. 24 Idem. 25 Bruce & Stokoe, 1882. 26 Dean-Smith, 1954, 12. 27 Carl Engel, An Introduction to the Study of National Music (London: Longmans, 1866). 28 Engel, 1866, 1 (footnote 1). Despite this, he was quite happy to use the term folk-lore (a ‘good Saxon compound’ coined some 20 years earlier by W J Thoms) without any such qualification in the preface to the same book (p.vii). See p10, footnote 4 in Dean-Smith 1954 for details of the separate genesis of the two terms. 29 Engl, 1866, viii. 40 seemed relatively universal, Engel suggested that the modes musical of expression vary between nations and races according to their ‘peculiar character’, which had been determined by the prevailing climate, local diet and available employment over time; even the populace’s preference for beer or wine had an impact on the modality of their collective music making.30

Two of the largest scale antiquarian works, both with lasting legacies, appeared in the latter half of the 19th century. The Ballad Literature and Popular Music of the Olden Time (1859)31 was the work of William Chappell, a senior partner in the publishing firm of the same name. His texts were taken from printed broadside ballads and thus were pure antiquarianism, not intended to reflect the oral tradition. What is unusual for the period is that the melodies were (mostly) supplied to accompany the text. By contrast, no musical notation was included in Frances J Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, published posthumously in 5 volumes between 1882 and 1898. The work was an attempt to collate and categorise ballad texts from printed and manuscript sources, not least to enable comparison between the varying versions of each narrative archetype. As Harvard Professor of English, Child had little interest in the oral tradition or collecting melodies for the texts, but his work did much to legitimise the field of ballad studies.32 Although Child’s collection stands as perhaps the most significant antiquarian work of folksong collection to this day, it was a late example of a dying breed. A quiet revolution had been taking place; a collection that had drawn little notice upon it’s initial release had set in motion a swing towards collections of songs published specifically for use by singers.

That collection was the Rev. John Broadwood’s Old English Songs… , collected from the oral tradition in and Surrey (in that he had learned them by hearing them sung, rather than actively seeking them out), and published in 1843. The contemporary impact of the book was hampered by the limited print run, but nonetheless it stands as the first of its kind.33 It also set the trend for collections to be harmonised, which meant in practice that the song was printed with a accompaniment, making it suitable for parlour or concert stage use; they were intended to be sung by the musical public, as Broadwood’s niece Lucy (herself a collector of some note) later acknowledged:

30 Engl, 1866, 169. 31 This publication date is disputed – it may in fact have been available in some form, at least to his fellow scholars, as early as 1855. See Dean-Smith, 1954 , 9 (footnote 1). 32 Vic Gammon, ‘Folk song collecting in Sussex and Surrey 1843-1914’, History Workshop, 10 (Autumn 1980), 73. 33 Gammon, 1980, 73. 41 While to give the tunes without the accompaniment is doubtless the most scientific way of preserving the songs, it has the disadvantage of rendering them practically useless to educated singers.34

One unfortunate side effect was that the song texts had to be suitable for Victorian sensibilities before they could be offered commercially, and thus alterations occurred where allusions were made to unwed pregnancy, sexual promiscuity, incest etc. This was a legacy accepted as necessity by later collectors such as Sabine Baring-Gould, Charles Marson, and Cecil Sharp, even if the latter pair expressed some regret over the necessity. The Rev. Baring-Gould displayed no such qualms, dutifully re-writing songs he deemed ‘objectionable’, ‘too coarse’, ‘very indelicate’ or similarly unpalatable.35 This was justified in part by an increasing belief that it was in the melody, rather than the text, in which the true value of folk song lay: good tune writing required no formal education, great poetry required tuition.36 Such restrictions were not wholly due to the collectors, as even if the editors had wished to issue unexpurgated versions of the texts, a reputable Victorian publisher would not have risked their reputation by putting their name to such a book.37 Subject matter was not the only reason to adapt a text, as colloquial grammatical peculiarities, idioms of local dialect and changes in lyrical metre between verses were all ‘softened’ to make them more suitable for the buying public. This process marked a shift from the ideals of the earlier antiquarian collectors, and was a cause of some consternation to scholars of the poetry of folk song; as J Reeves later regretted: ‘In this way the wild flower was domesticated beyond recognition; The folk song became the art song.’38

A slew of publications in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century demonstrates the eventual dominance of these so called ‘singing collections’ over antiquarian examples, both in terms of the growth of the movement to collect and disseminate folk song, and of the expanding market willing to buy it. 1888 saw a small collection from Heywood Sumner entitled The Besom Maker, and other country Folk-Songs —the first British publication to use the term ‘Folk-song’ in its title, albeit still hyphenated— and the following year the Rev. Broadwood’s book was republished, revised and updated with additional material collected by . The first part of Rev. Sabine Baring Gould and the Rev. H ’s

34 Lucy E. Broadwood and J. A. Fuller Maitland, English County Songs (London: J.B. Cramer and Co., 1893), 5. The Broadwoods were part of a famous family of piano makers dating back to the late 1700s, which may also have had some bearing on the decision to use piano parts… 35 Reeves, J., The Idiom Of The People: English Traditional Song from the MSS of Cecil Sharp (London: Heinemann Ltd, 1958), 8-16. 36 Ibid, 11-13. 37 Ibid, 8-9. 38 Idem. 42 four ’s and Ballads of the West: a Collection Made from the Mouths of the People was issued in 1889, with the other three volumes on sale by the end of 1891, a year which also saw collector Frank Kidson publish Traditional Tunes, and W A Barrett produced English Folk Songs.39 Lucy Broadwood and J A Fuller-Maitland’s English County Songs (1893) was an attempt to represent each of England’s Counties with at least one song (although three Counties proved ‘impossible to procure anything whatever’ from) with the dialect of each preserved in the text as near as was possible in print.40

By 1895, according to the estimation of the American scholar D K Wilgus, there were approximately 600 songs ‘published for singers, not scholars’ available to the British public; of these publications, only Kidson and Bruce & Stokoe had chosen to forego the addition of piano accompaniments.41 There was clearly a market for material collected from the oral tradition, albeit edited with varying degrees of additions, deletions and alterations, all in the perceived interest of the consumer. The sudden flood of publications in the last years of the 19th century can also be seen as evidence for the increase in collecting activity, with more amateur enthusiasts than ever before making forays into their local villages in hope of unearthing some near forgotten songs, tunes, lore or customs. There was an eagerness amongst these new collectors to share and discuss their findings with other interested parties, but as yet no formal platform in which to do it.

1.3 The Folk Song Society

The formation of a society for this new movement began in January 1898, and was ‘fully inaugurated’ in June of that year.42 Whilst the creation of the Folk-Song Society has been hailed as ‘a beginning of serious study’ of the actual musical content in folk song

39 That this all but forgotten collection of 54 songs (collected edited and arranged by the author) was not more influential is surprising in hindsight. William Alexander Barrett (1834-1891) was well known as a singer, music critic, public speaker and journalist, editing the Musical Times as well as contributing to other periodicals of his day. His relatively early death (at the age of 57) in the same year the book was published may have been a contributing factor to its lack of impact, but it seems that a scandal involving the acceptance of a Mus. Doc. “granted in absentia” by Trinity College Toronto had badly damaged his credibility in later life – even those writing his obituaries saw fit to mention it. See the following obituaries: THE LATE W. A. BARRETT. Musical News, 1/34 (Oct 23, 1891), 679. MR. W. A. BARRETT. Musical Standard, 41/1421 (Oct 24, 1891), 336. 40 Broadwood & Fuller Maitland, 1893, 5. 41 D. K. Wilgus, Anglo-American Folk-Song Scholarship Since 1898 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1959), 126. 42 Anon., ‘A Folk Song Function’ Musical Times, 40/673 (March 1, 1899), 168. 43 scholarship,43 this was not in itself a revolutionary concept: a ‘diffuse movement’ of folkloric societies had been in existence since the late 17th century.44 William Chappell had been a founder member of the Musical Antiquarian Society in 1840, and was also an active member of the Ballad Society, inaugurated in 1868.45 It had been proposed that folk song was merely a sub-section of folklore, and thus the existing Folklore Society (founded in 1878) would provide a meeting place for the collectors, but ultimately a separate organisation was formed. Many of the aforementioned collectors were members of this new Folk-Song Society (including Lucy Broadwood and Frank Kidson), which set out its focus of activity as follows:

The society shall have for its primary object the collection and preservation of Folk-songs, Ballads and Tunes, and the publication of such of these as may be deemed advisable.46 Musical Times, March 1st, 1899

In addition, the society aimed to provide a forum for collectors and researchers to present their findings to likeminded individuals, forming an intellectual hub for interested parties. This provided an outlet for the serious enthusiast of folk song, and allowed songs to be published with fewer alterations than those adapted for public consumption, although some collectors, such as Baring Gould, would still not publish anything they deemed unsuitable (although to his credit, the Reverend still dutifully recorded them unedited in his notes for future generations to examine if they so wished). The Society also published a journal for its subscribers, edited by selected members, in which the findings of the scattered collectors could be published.

As an example of the society’s activities, the first full meeting, held ‘in a Mayfair mansion’ on the 2nd of February 1899, started with an address from the composer Sir , in his role as president of the society.47 The focus of his remarks was that folk song, being ‘amongst the purest products of the human mind’, could be of great benefit to society at large. The ‘enemy at the door’ of the ‘old folk music’ was modern popular song, which he opined was symptomatic of the evils of the age, redolent of ‘sham’ and ‘false ideals’. He closed by extolling the virtues of folk music as being the repository of the ‘national’ style, the

43 Wilgus, 1959, Xviii. 44 Gammon, 1980. 45 Gammon, 1980, 73. 46 A Folk Song Function’ Musical Times, 40/673 (March 1, 1899), 168. 47 Idem. 44 ‘outpouring of [the] countless combined souls’ of ‘fellow-workers’.48 That on one hand Parry could praise the musical output of the , and damn their current tastes with the other, highlights the class divide between the collectors and those from whom they collected. The collectors active in Sussex and Surrey, for example, were ‘a well connected lot of musicians and musical amateurs’, often in possession of a private income.49 That members of this ‘Squirearchy’ were appropriating and altering their songs did not necessarily impress the source singers.

One such unimpressed singer was John England, a gardener from Somerset. When he heard his song ‘the Seeds of Love’ performed by a professional singer, accompanied on the piano, he was ‘doubtful of the evening dress’ this new context put his song in.50 At the piano was the song’s collector: a man who had never collected a song before that day. This was Cecil Sharp, who would become the dominant figure of the folk song movement in a remarkably short stretch of time. The huge amount of energy he expended in collecting songs (no other collector matched the volume he recorded), the extent of his publications and the passion with which we worked for his chosen cause have much to do with his success. There is a darker side, manipulative side to his perceived place in the history: Sharp set out to dominate the field by whatever means necessary. Much has been written in critique of his actions and motives (see Harker especially),51 and he was certainly a man who divided opinions and provoked strong reactions throughout his life. His single-minded belief in his own inherent rectitude could either be interpreted as visionary genius, or as the near fanatical zealotry of an egomaniac: what is certain is that he proved very difficult to work with for many collaborators.52

Although he had only begun collecting in 1903, Sharp’s work had sufficient impact in the field that in February 1904 he was on the committee of the Folk Song Society (he had been a member since 1901, before his collecting started).53 The material was being collected from the oral tradition, and published both in quantity for popular consumption and in a special

48 Ibid, 170. In addition to what the reporting journalist assures us was Parry’s ‘essentially brainy’ address, the meeting also contained talks on modal survivals in folk song from a Mr E. Jacques, and stories of collecting experiences from the society’s founder and honorary secretary, Miss Kate Lee. 49 Gammon 1980, 62-3. 50 A. H. Fox-Strangways, Cecil Sharp (London: , 1933), 33. 51 Dave Harker, Fakesong: The Manufacture of British ‘Folksong’ 1700 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985). 52 Vic Gammon, ‘Many Useful Lessons: Cecil Sharp, Education and the Folk Dance Revival, 1899-1924’ Cultural and Social History, 5/1 (2008), 75–98. 53 John Valdis Francmanis, The Musical Sherlock Holmes: Frank Kidson and the Revival, c.1890-1926 (Ph.D Thesis) (Leeds: Leeds Met. University, 1997), 221. 45 interest journal for those whose interests ran to a deeper, scholarly bent. The pieces were in place for a revival, but it was not songs that would provide the impetus needed to create a national movement, but the previously all but neglected area of traditional dance. Despite his efforts and later claims, the credit for this cannot be laid wholly at Sharp’s door, but largely rests with Mary Neal. For a time, Sharp, Neal and their associates were able to work alongside one another other, even producing a joint publication on Morris dancing before the dispute broke out.

1.3.1 An overview of the prevailing conceptions of folk music circa 1900.

Before discussing the specifics of the conflict between the Nealite and Sharpian camps, or examining the differing pedagogical stances they adopted as events unfolded, a brief summary of the assumption underlying the debate about folk music and dance at the dawn of the 20th century will shed useful light on the foundations on which many of their arguments were based. More precise statements on the positions held by specific individuals will be detailed later in the chapter as appropriate; the list of concepts below serves as a more general overview of the debate at the time.

It was Ancient: Folk musics were held to be survivals of ‘primitive’ culture, passed down through the ages and slowly degraded with the passage of time. The best and most valuable ballads, which exhibited the truest nature of the genre, would only be found by tracing back versions of songs as close as possible ‘to the point where they vanish in the mists of unrecorded time’.54 This semi mythological, semi historical presumed point of origin can be traced back to Herder and the very inception of the term folk song: in essence, folk song had been considered historical from the moment it was considered as a concept at all.55

It was Over: Folk song was held to be ‘a closed account’. Since a folk song was inherently a historical entity, it could not be created anew: all the folk music that could ever exist had already been created, and only the remnants and survivals could be uncovered. This view precludes the notion of second revival practices such as adapting existing material for current use, or creating new folk music in response to events of the present. For the collectors of the early 20th century, folk music was a finite resource.

54 Wilgus, 1959. 55 Bohlman, Philip V. (ed.), The Cambridge History of World Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 255. 46

It was Endangered: Not only was folk song a finished and finite commodity, it was also dwindling rapidly. The ‘old fashioned’ way of life that had both given rise to these musics and ensured the continuity of tradition was considered all but gone: it was this that made present collecting activities imperative. That rural life had undergone repeated and rapid change since the agricultural and industrial revolutions could hardly be disputed; the arrival and spread of the railway in rural England the latter half of the 19th century, protests from farm labourers over working conditions and pay in the 1870s (the so-called ‘revolt of the field’) and an agricultural depression (resulting in very low crop prices) in the last two decades of the century had all taken their toll on traditional village life.56 The possibility that this increasingly mobile workforce of former agricultural labourers may have taken their songs with them into towns and cities, mills and factories was not explored until the post-war revival of the 1950s: the concept of such industrial folk song would have been seen as inherently oxymoronic by earlier collectors. Each generation in turn considered itself slightly too late to collect this vanishing repertoire, from Herder in the mid 1700s, to Bruce & Stokoe in the 1850s, to Sharp et al in the early 1900s; the narrative of the desperate struggle for the last vanishing vestiges of tradition held considerable appeal, adding an air of cultural heroism to the collector’s efforts.

It was Rural: Folk song could be found in areas in which the endangered lifestyle that had engendered it still held sway. Urban living after the was held to be the antithesis of the environment which nurtured, inspired and preserved folk song: only by going out and seeking isolated rural areas in which a pre-industrial lifestyle was still largely intact could authentic folksong be found. This view would persist well into the mid 20th century, when second revival collectors would begin to look for industrial folk song amongst the working classes in towns and cities. The ideal source for folk song would be elderly individuals living in isolated farming, herding or fishing communities. The wistful of this view is clear with hindsight, not least in the numerous instances in which collectors describe such tradition bearers as members of ‘the peasantry’: a term which had been functionally anachronistic since the demise of feudalism.57 In England, such areas were

56 M. K. Ashby, The Changing English Village 1066 to 1914 (Kineton: Roundwood Press, 1974), 340-348. 57 In a forthcoming edition of the Folk Music Journal, Vic Gammon and Arthur Knevett seek to clarify what was meant by the term peasant when used by collectors of this era to describe their informants. Whilst an exhaustive and detailed examination of the evolution of the meanings implied by the term throughout the C19th and early C20th, it features only information from the privileged side of the the power differential: they were unable to find evidence of a reflexive use of the word peasant by any who could realistically be described as one, nor any recorded reaction from anyone on the receiving end of this epithet, whether positive or negative. The article, 47 held to include Sussex, the Cotswold villages of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, and several collectors could well visit the same area on numerous occasions if it was thought to be a rich seam; the village of Bledington in Gloucestershire, for example, would be visited by collectors of folk song, Morris dances, dance tunes and mummers plays in the opening decades of the 20th century.58

It was Communal: That folk song had a communal origin, in much the same way that the words of its parent language had, was a common but not universally accepted view at the start of the 20th century. Communalist notions of folk song origin had been preceded by the same argument in literary circles concerning the origin of ballad text where folk poetry was held to be an evolutionarily separate strand from art poetry. The most extreme position of this romantic notion followed the thinking of the German folklore collectors the Brothers Grimm, who held that the stories simply ‘wrote themselves’: an idea dismissed by more pragmatic antiquarian scholars such as F J Child.59 Despite its polarizing position, communalism was still central to the debate at the close of the 19th century, especially amongst American scholars: Francis Barton Gummere, William Wells Newell and Andrew Lang all wrote in support of communalism in the 1890s.60 The more generalist idea of communal growth and transmission of folk song was less controversial. The survival of song via community selection, in passage through time, lent a pseudo-Darwinian sheen of evolutionary science to the discourse. Communalism as theory of folk song origin, after repeated challenge by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, was largely discredited by the mid 1930s.61

It was Natural: Because the creators of folk song had not had a formal education to teach them otherwise, they were able to express only their true and natural selves in “simple and artless” style. It should be noted that these terms were used in a complimentary, rather than a critical sense: simplicity was considered a virtue; “art” and “artfulness” were equated with artifice in this setting. The ‘unlettered peasant’, from whom folksong could be collected, was defined against the ‘educated composer’ of art music: the scholar-collector’s skill with a pen was needed to preserve evidence of the oral tradition only because the tradition bearers could not. Being natural, folk song was also held up to be wholesome and healthy-giving, and a

entitled English Folk Song Collectors and the Idea of the Peasant, will appear in Folk Music Journal Volume 11 Number 1, 2016 . 58 Ashby, 1974, 393-400. 59 Wilgus, 1959, 8. 60 Wilgus, 1959, 4. It should be noted that Andrew Lang later reversed his position on communalism in 1901, as also detailed by Wilgus, p.46. 61 Ibid, XIV. 48 refining influence on the public’s comparatively vulgar taste in transient popular song of the .62

It was National: Although Herder had not directly suggested the notion, by the turn of the 19th century the idea that folk musics were an expression of national, and more specifically, racial characteristics was widespread. Comparison between races and nations was central to nationalist discourse: Herder’s assertion that any one Volk could only be truly assessed under its own unique criteria, rendering comparison meaningless, was forgotten. Folk music had become an integral part of the wider justification of the colonialist reification of the nation- state.

1.4 Mary Neal and the Espérance Morris Guild

Neal’s life and work have not received the same amount of attention in print as Sharp, and her autobiography remains largely unpublished at the time of writing. Vital to understanding Neal’s actions are the twin strands of her faith and her politics — often inextricably interwoven. The religious side of her nature has perhaps been downplayed in the writings of Roy Judge and others (Ellen Ross being the notable exception), but should not be underestimated as a determining force. Profoundly spiritual throughout her life, it was faith that led her to move from a comfortable suburban life in Birmingham, which she described as ‘a pageant of snobbery’63which, as she was obliged to take part in activities which were deemed suitable for a young lady, wasted her potential to make an impact on the world:

I remember sitting morning after morning at the window of a room still called the nursery and watching the stream of men going to daily office work, taking part as I thought, in worth while, real work, whilst I arranged flowers, dusted the drawing room and practised cooking and sewing to fill up my days.64

Much affected by reading of the plight of London’s poor, a chance meeting in 1888 with a young woman who had just volunteered for the newly formed Methodist West London Mission (WLM) prompted Neal to leave Edgebaston (seemingly within a matter of weeks of this meeting) to join these ‘Sisters of the People’, adopting the name she was to become

62 Dean Smith, 1954, 9-10. 63 Mary Neal, As a tale that is told (unpublished and undated autobiography, held in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, Cecil Sharp House) 14-15. Extracts are available here: http://www.maryneal.org/, albeit presented in a fragmentary fashion which is difficult to search methodically. 64 Neal, As a tale that is told, 46. 49 known by—Sister Mary (she had been christened Clara Sophia).65 It was here, in 1891, that she met Emmeline Pethick. The two formed a firm friendship, sharing not only their work but also their ideals: ideals which were to move steadily away from those of the WLM. Initially:

Both women seem to have been good evangelical Christians on their arrival in Soho. They were temperance advocates and street preachers; they visited the local poor and the Mission’s members daily, Bibles in hand. They easily accepted the Mission’s injunction against dancing in the girls club that they ran, and exacted a promise from club members that they would “sing no songs which they would not like Jesus Christ to hear”.66

The Club mentioned above was one of the pair’s chief duties, taking place on four nights each week, but the mission also allowed the two to develop the skills they would become known for in later life. Neal’s impressive abilities as a journalist, fundraiser and administrator were honed working on Advance!, the Mission’s monthly newsletter. Pethick found her gift for public speaking at the many meetings and public events the organization held. By 1893 both were also committed socialists, spurred on by their involvement in generating support and funds for the wives of the Yorkshire Miner’s strike. As Neal reflected in her autobiography:

The five years during which I was face to face, day after day, with every conceivable trouble caused by poverty have left an indelible mark on my mind and spirit, and coloured the attitude which I cannot help taking on social and economic problems. And I am inclined to think that an attitude inspired by actual experience face to face with those suffering under economic conditions is sounder than that of those whose attitude has been inspired by academic knowledge learnt from books and lectures.67

The pair’s increasing radicalization left them at odds with the rest of the mission; a life supposedly dedicated caring for the poor whilst they themselves were living in comfort, with regular meals brought to them by servants seemed increasingly hypocritical. This view was not shared by the majority of those at the mission, which lead to conflict, and ultimately the pair breaking away to set up their own establishment. The catalyst was once again faith.

It began by our reading the life of S. Francis of Assisi by M. Sabatier. Everything towards which we were striving seemed to be expressed in the Saint who loved poverty as a bride, who lived in the open, whose friends were the poor, whose companions the birds and the flowers. The book sent a thrill through our work which made our life look smug and comfortable and horribly conventional and

65 Ellen Ross, ‘Disgruntled Missionaries: The Friendship of and Mary Neal and Emmeline Pethick Lawrence at the West London Mission’, The Mary Neal Project, 2009. NB: this article is part of the somewhat haphazard archive on the Mary Neal Project website, here: http://www.maryneal.org/file-uploads/files/file/MNPellen-ross- essay.pdf (23/10/17). 66 Ibid, 5. 67 Neal, As a tale that is told, 63. 50 uninspired…68

The pair resolved to live and work as those whose lives they were working to improve, taking a small flat near St. Pancras, and subsisting on the equivalent of a sewing girl’s wages (£1 a week), without domestic help or any of the comforts they had hitherto been afforded. They started their new club for the local girls in 1895, which they named the Espérance club, after the spirit of hope. Run on similar lines to the previous club at the WLM, there was one notable departure: they set out specifically to teach the previously restricted area of music and drama. As a ‘lavish and transgressive parting gift’ to the Mission, they had already used dancing and a few folk songs in a Mayday performance. That they may well have bankrolled this performance themselves is an implied statement of intent for their future work together.69 Wanting to make a material as well as spiritual difference to lifestyle of those they worked with, two years later they established dressmakers co-operative for the girls (the Maison D’ Espérance), guaranteeing a minimum wage (15s), a maximum working day (8 hours) and a clean, well-ventilated and well-lit workspace.70 This was a progressive move in an era when working conditions were not closely regulated, and entirely in keeping with their socialist ideals. They also continued a tradition they had started in their mission days of organizing annual weeklong country holidays for the dressmaking girls. Neal acted as the honorary secretary for the club, and Pethick was the first musical director.

These roles point to a factor that was later emphasized by opponents of the Esperance girl’s activities; Neal herself was never directly in charge of the arts provision at the club, leaving that instead to a series of musical directors. As mentioned, the first of these was Pethick, from 1895 until her marriage in 1901. She did not leave so as to become a dutiful housewife however. She was heavily and passionately involved in the women’s suffrage movement, as was her new husband Frederick (the couple made the then unusual step of adopting each other’s surnames, becoming the Pethick-Lawrences). Her involvement became increasingly militant, and lead to her frequent imprisonment during the first decade of the 20th century and on occasion brutal forced feeding when hunger strikes were employed. Frederick, a wealthy lawyer, provided bail for his wife and many other suffragettes during the course of the struggle.

Her replacement as musical director was the novelist Herbert C MacIlwaine, author of titles such as ‘The Twilight Reef’, ‘The Undersong’ and ‘Fate the Fiddler’. Despite being a self

68 Neal, As a tale that is told, 7. 69 Ross, 2009. NB: no page numbers in article. 70 Ibid. 51 confessed amateur in the field of music—albeit one with a ‘knack for passing on the music that pleased him to susceptible and willing juniors’71—it was MacIlwaine who provided the chance encounter that was to ultimately lead to the folk dance revival. Having read a newspaper interview with Cecil Sharp, and finding that the girls were not really taking to the available art music, he suggested to Neal that English folk songs would be suitable items for the club’s Christmas party, believing that ‘few Londoners were more than 3 generations from peasant forefathers, and would learn such songs easily’. They met in September 1905, and Sharp was happy to provide a selection of songs for the Esperance girls use. These proved to be such a success at the club that within a month or so Neal asked Sharp if there were any dances that would serve as a fitting counterpoint to the songs. Sharp gave her the name of one William Kimber, leader of the Headington Quarry Morris side in Oxfordshire: the side had been the catalysts of Sharp’s oft reported and much mythologized ‘road to Damascus moment’ in realizing the value of traditional dance in 1899.72 Neal promptly travelled to the village and arranged for Kimber and his cousin to come down to London, to teach the girls personally at the club.

The Christmas party being a resounding success, MacIlwaine contrived a cohesive performance piece—An English Pastoral— to tie the songs and dances together, with the girls playing the romanticized part of rustic villagers at a communal celebration. Neal’s skill at administrating and publicizing the event lead to a large and influential attendance: this performance marks the beginning of the folk dance revival.73

During the brief period of full co-operation between the Sharp and Neal camps (roughly 1905-07), MacIlwaine worked with Sharp to produce co-authored publications. 1907 saw the launch of both The Morris Book (containing notations for ten recently collected dances) and accompanying books of Morris Tunes for the dances to be performed to. MacIlwaine provided the dance notations (largely taken down form the club’s acknowledged best dancer, Florence ‘Florrie’ Warren), and Sharp the historical context and musical commentary. MacIlwaine felt compelled to terminate his public association with the Esperance club in

71 Cecil Sharp with Herbert C. MacIlwaine, The Morris Book: with a description of the dances as performed by the Morris Men of England (London: Novello, 1906). 72 See Gammon, 2008, 73, or Fox-Strangways, 1933, 26-27, for examples. Whilst this story is often told to show Sharp’s links with the Morris revival, it should be noted that he had made no effort whatsoever to collect a Morris dance from Headington or any other side until after Neal had brought William Kimber to London to teach her girls. 73 It should be noted that a much smaller scale attempt at a revival had been made by D’Arcy Ferrers in the Bidford-on-Avon area around 1886 (See Kidson and Neal, 1915, 159). Sharp had taken the dances to be traditional and published them. The Neal camp scored a palpable hit in the propaganda war when the self- appointed ‘expert’ was proved to be in error. The dances were dropped by Sharp from the 2nd edition of the Morris book. 52 November 1908, when he felt obliged to distance himself from the organisation due to their open support of the women’s suffrage movement, which at the time was involved in violent protests. Neal, unlike Pethick-Lawrence, appears not to have taken part in any of the more aggressive moves by the suffragettes, but the club’s dancers would appear at rallies and fundraisers for the movement, and Neal wrote articles in their support. MacIlwaine appears to have remained on relatively good terms with Neal personally, and would still pass enquiries on to the club as a matter of course. Certainly by the time of his early death in 1916 they were reconciled, as demonstrated by Neal’s adoption of his son Anthony.

Clive Carey (1883-1968) took the musical director’s baton from MacIlwaine, and stayed with the Club until the outbreak of war, possibly even motivated by sympathy for the women’s suffrage movement that had alienated his predecessor.74 In later life he was best known as an Opera director, producer and singer (especially as an interpreter of Mozart roles)75, but he was also an active folk song and dance collector in his own right, publishing 10 English Folk Songs in 1915, and later collecting shanties in between the wars. His contribution to the second Esperance Morris book (issued after the schism with Sharp) was in notating the steps, and in collecting and arranging the music. He was aided in this latter regard by Geoffrey Toye (1889 – 1942), later a ballet composer of some note, and known for working with the D’Oyly Carte, Saddlers Wells and the Royal Opera Company.76 Neal’s impressive facility for social networking had once again provided her with skilled and influential supporters.

Neal was ‘not a singer, and did not herself dance’77 and left the collecting, notating and arranging of the music and dances to her musical directors, and the dance instruction to Florence ‘Florrie’ Warren and her colleagues amongst the sewing girls. Consequently, her views on how the material should be transmitted are hard to fathom at first glance. Most of her writing concerns the benefits that she believed the activities granted to her participants, and the future gains (highly unrealistic in hindsight) to be had by society at large if the

74 C. J. Bearman, ‘Carey, (Francis) Clive Savill (1883–1968)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/55317, (23/10/2017). 75 Elizabeth Forbes. "Carey, Clive." The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. ed. S. Sadie. Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, (23/10/2017). 76 Arthur Jacobs. "Toye, Geoffrey." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. (23/10/17). 77 Fox-Strangways 1933, 69. It appears that Neal was also either unable or extremely unwilling to collect and notate music herself. This is somewhat surprising, as it seems likely that she would have received some musical instruction due to her upbringing. She was certainly always accompanied when on collecting trips, and would go to great lengths to avoid notating herself. On one occasion, having met an old seafarer in Boston whilst on a tour of the USA, rather than collecting the song ‘Shallow Brown’ from him herself, she cabled Carey to meet him off his ship when it docked in London to notate it! See the introduction to the The Espérance Morris Book: part 2. 53 movement were to continue to grow. The only references I have found to her actually teaching are of leading singing games for a group of young children, so her direct pedagogical involvement seems to have been slight.78 The 1905 pamphlet Set to Music is an apt example, showing what Judge describes as her ‘heightened and romantic’ style of writing, with all its journalistic flair. Its chief aim is to generate revenue for the new movement (at that point in time still united), and the style hardly differs from previous Neal publications designed to raise funds before the revival, such as Dear Mother Earth (1901) or My Pretty Maid (1897/8?)79. Essentially they all state the same message: that the Club is doing miraculous things for the wellbeing of young working girls, and public donation would assist them in continuing to do so. This is significant in that it demonstrates clearly that Neal saw Morris dancing first and foremost as a philanthropic exercise.

The 1915 publication of the book English Folk-Song and Dance, by Neal and noted collector and scholar Frank Kidson, would appear to offer hope in answering the question of Neal’s pedagogical leanings with regards to music, but this is not the case: what is presented as a co- authored book is in fact two completely separate texts bound within the same cover, with Kidson writing on song, and Neal on dance. Nor can this appearance together in print be taken as indication of Kidson’s alignment with the Nealite cause: he refused to be drawn into the conflict. 80There was one aspect in which they did find themselves in concord however – they were both strongly opposed to Sharp’s attempts to introduce Folk song and Dance into the school curriculum, Kidson so much so that he felt compelled write to Sharp detailing his reservations twice in the space of four days.81 In a later article from ‘the magazine’, Kidson sets out his stall on this subject so clearly as to be worth quoting at length:

The folksong is, generally, so different in spirit [from art musics] that I conceive it utterly out of place among young children, and I say this both on behalf of the folk-song and the child, making some very few exceptions. In a great number of cases the folk-song sings of matters which are, or should be, above the comprehension of a child. Its subject is too frequently a tragic episode, treated in powerful, if rugged, verse, and very frequently in allegory, which is plain enough to those who are older and are familiar with this early method of treating such matters.

78 Mary Neal, The Espérance Morris Book: part 1 (London: Curwen, 1911), 13. 79 The Pamphlet is undated, and its publication is not detailed in the timeline provided by the Mary Neal Project website, possibly for that very reason. The language used suggests that it was written very early in the existence of the club, hence my suggested date range. I have been unable to find any source that can confirm or deny this. 80 Francmanis, 1997. 81 Ibid, 276. 54 Of course, in these instances the songs are, when put forward, robbed of their unpleasant savour by omissions and alterations, but they cannot then be properly called ‘ folk-songs,’ though with a charming tune they may be very passable lyrics.

The essence of Kidson’s argument is that folk song is often, in its ‘raw state’ as collected, completely unfit for use in a classroom: once subject matters such as death, sex, immorality and vengeance (supernatural or otherwise) are removed from the repertoire, there is surprisingly little left to sing. Conversely, heavy handed editing to remove any suggestions of unsavoury character, he argues, leaves the singer with something lesser than a true folk song. This assessment reveals something about his own bias: Kidson, being of an essentially antiquarian bent, places greater store by the poetry of the text than the beauty of the tune when determining a folk song’s worth, unlike Sharp, Vaughan Williams et al who were pushing the schools agenda. However, Kidson’s criticism here is prescient of the post-war revival’s turn against sanitised, school friendly material. Kidson was not done with his critique, and continued:

There is another very great objection to the school singing of folk-songs, and that is that when a song, or a type of song, has become associated with schools, or handed over to the children, nobody will sing it on a concert platform.

In consequence, a folk-song, which in many examples is the essence of beauty, is seldom rendered by singers who are capable of expressing the delicacy and pathos that is the real charm of a folk-song. Though we may tolerate the shrill singing in unison by a couple of dozen young school children of such an emotional and personal song as ‘ I sowed the seeds of love,’ or others of like character, yet the most enthusiastic advocate of folk-songs for schools cannot maintain that it could possibly be sung under these conditions as to display either its beauty of tune or of words. It is, however, quite certain that when such a ditty has become recognized as associated with a school class, few singers would venture to include it in their repertoire for concert production.82

The assumption that the concert stage would be the preferable setting for folk song aside, his real objection here is that should folk music become seen as a primarily an educational exercise tool, then it will be seen as beneath the attention of professional performers. As the majority of public folk music performances shifted towards the school hall from the concert hall, the general standard of technical competence would appear to be drastically lower, and the reputation of the music would be commensurately denigrated. This issue would later be played out in a different form: as the use of the recorder in schools increased, it was to the detriment of the reputation of

82 Frank Kidson (writing as ‘The Collector’), ‘Folk-Song’, The Choir, 3/26 (February 1912), 30-31. 55 both the instrument itself, and the associated Baroque repertoire that the previously been the preserve of Early Music specialists. Kidson’s final objection completed this thought:

The idea that the songs which a child has sung (under compulsion) at school, he will turn to with avidity in his mature years, is one with which I cannot agree. In my own experience, I have never found an instance. If it be considered that folk- song is desirable towards a child’s education, let it hear folksongs sung with all the grace and expression that an experienced singer ran draw from it, then the child may perhaps dimly realize for the first time the quality to be admired therein.’83

That folksong, once introduced to the school, would become confined to the classroom—both by initial association and later recalled distaste—was Kidson’s greatest fear for the Sharp’s agenda. Neal expresses similar concerns for dance in her section of the book, wishing to retain the personal element of one dancer learning from another:

I have sometimes regretted that the folk-dance has become officially recognized as part of the school curriculum, and I regret too the necessity for books of instructions. I would rather the dances had remained in the memories of dancers and that the right atmosphere had been secured only by the verbal telling of folk tale and legend. But books seem to be a necessity to-day, and lest again we lose our national heritage of dance, perhaps it is well that some records have been made…84

She was also concerned by the risks of a canonised school curriculum leading to the dances becoming fossilized, believing that a degree of individual variation was essential to maintaining the spirit of the dances. Neal’s insistence on the ability for tradition to evolve and respond to those enacting it, allowing each dancer to express their individuality, was completely opposite to Sharp’s wish to preserve the dances accurately as they were initially collected. Individual variation was, to Neal, the essence of the Morris:

This will keep the traditional dances from becoming set and rigid, and will give a delightful air of spontaneity if at any folk festival, while all dance correctly, each dances a little differently to the others…. Nothing is less to be desired than that any school or any individual should take possession of this national treasure [folk dance]…85

Perhaps the best indication of her approach to the teaching of music comes from the first Espérance Morris Book (1911). Her first assertion is that the music —seven songs and seven children’s singing games are included — should be taught entirely by ear.

83 Kidson, 1912. 84 Frank Kidson & Mary Neal, English Folk-Song and Dance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), 172. 85 Kidson & Neal, 1915, 173. 56 I want to make this chapter as practical and as helpful as possible to those who propose to teach the folk-songs to children, boys and girls, and to any who are what all true folk-song singers are—musically unlettered…. The Espérance girls and children have never seen the words of the songs, and I hope no one who learns them through this book ever will.86

In other words, it should be accessible to all, regardless of their social background or level of musical education. The way the song was transmitted was, in Neal’s opinion, of greater importance than the end result: as ever, the maintaining right feel was Neal’s primary motivation. In fact, she saw no need to formalize the teaching the songs in a structured style at all:

Although we always say, when sending out a teacher of the dances and games, that we do not undertake to teach the songs, rumours constantly reach me that the songs are taught—that is merely that they are sung and learnt as traditional music should be learnt, and as the songs were originally learnt and handed on from one generation to another. Only nowadays the songs are sometimes handed back a generation or two as well as taught to the children.87

In both music and dance instruction, Neal’s concern was with capturing the spirit and essence of the dance or song, as transmitted from one actual singer or dancer to another. In Judge’s estimation “She believed in the power of the material to transmit itself, and did not consider the production of set patterns essential”. Nor was there any need within a Nealite framework for any kind of authority figure to oversee this process. As Neal herself stated:

I recognise no expert in Morris dancing, but the traditional dancer himself, and I recognise no expert teachers of Morris dance but those who have been directly taught by the traditional dancer… To me it seems as unreasonable as to talk about an expert in making people happy.88

1.5 Cecil Sharp and the Board of Education

At the turn of the 20th century, whilst an extracurricular examination syllabus had been offered by both the ABRSM and Trinity since the mid 1870s, school based music teaching was still finding its place within the newly established board of education (only existent since 1899); whilst actually making music was being actively advocated as best practice, the best that most children could have hoped for would have been ‘music appreciation’ lessons, as no

86 Neal, 1911, 12. 87 Ibid, 12. 88 Judge, 1989. Judge cites the Morning Post, (5th May 1910), in his endnote 114, on page 586. 57 other subject required much more of the child than to sit in silence and receive tuition.89 With the 1905 publication of Suggestions for the Consideration of Teachers and Others Concerned in the Work of Public Elementary Schools, this began to change, with a strong emphasis being placed on participation (although the music appreciation model still had its adherents, with MacPherson chief amongst them)90. The chapter on singing had been written by Arthur Somervell, a recent and controversial appointment to the role of Inspector for Music, having no background in actually teaching music.91 It should be stated in his defence that he was a noted writer of music for school children and amateur .92 Somervell’s philosophy was that of frequent, short lessons, with work on rhythm (clapping games and movement), sight singing (he expected all children to be able to sing at sight by the time they reached secondary school, as not being able to do so was a sign of ignorance), ear training and, most importantly, the singing of ‘good songs’.

These ‘good’ songs were, in the early stages of education at least, to be national and folk songs (Somervell did not see a meaningful distinction between the two). He subscribed to the theory of racial recapitulation, wherein each child, during its development, passed through all of the stages of human cultural development, and that included developing the characteristics of its race. National songs would not only reinforce this process, and bolster an inherent sense of patriotic duty, but would also prove to be instinctive to the child, as each already contained the seeds of the national inheritance to which the songs spoke.93 He published an extensive list of potentially suitable material, and it was over this list that both Somervell and the Board of Education came into conflict with Cecil Sharp. In an article in the Musical Post, Sharp attacked the list for containing almost no genuine folk songs (under his own definition), and the Folk Song Society’s decision to endorse this list angered Sharp to the extent that he began writing his most influential book, English Folk Song: Some Conclusions that very day in direct response.94

This was not the first conflict that had arisen between Sharp and Somervell on the subject of national song. Sharp had published a book in 1902 entitled A Book of British Song for Home and School, before he had begun any kind of collecting, and thus was made up of pieces he

89 Stephanie Pitts, A Century of Change in Music Education: Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Practice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 12-14. 90 Ibid, 13. 91 Gordon Cox, A Education in England 1872-1928 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 83-4. 92 Michael Hurd. "Somervell, Sir Arthur." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. (23/10/2017). 93 Cox, 1993, 92. 94 Ibid, 147. 58 had found in collections by Baring-Gould and Broadwood and Maitland, as well as selections from Chappell.95 Sharp declared that he had made this selection because:

…being chiefly of folk origin, [they] are of assured humanity. I have further selected only those which are British, believing that such will appeal more directly to girls and boys, and will form a better educational groundwork than those songs which reflect the customs and ideas of other nations.96

Somervell was decidedly unimpressed by Sharp’s offering, and felt that the book had done considerable damage to his great efforts to have national and folk songs introduced into schools. He wrote to Sharp saying:

In my advocacy of the use of national songs in the schools I have encountered much opposition; and not to mince matters, I am the means by whom the thing can and must be done, and I tell you plainly that your book (which after all is published with the title “for home and school”) has been the hardest blow the movement has had. Some of the tunes were held up to ridicule as being very poor, and I’m bound to say I agree with the criticism…97

Despite this public conflict, Sharp was able to cultivate a strong vein of support within the Board, including HMIs like H Firth and Edward Burrows, and later highly influential figures such as E G A Holmes (Chief Inspector for Elementary Schools, and a progressive force within the Board) and H A L Fisher (President of the Board from 1916-22). As we shall see, schools were central to Sharps plans to disseminate Folk song and dance, and he had cultivated the influence he needed to make this a reality.

1.5.1 Cecil Sharp: Educator

Whilst Sharp’s life has been documented in detail, and specific incidents like his first encounter with William Kimber or John England almost mythologised through repeated re- telling, the focus has always been on Sharp the visionary collector.98 A summary of his achievements in the field of education will shed light on to his chosen profession: first and foremost, he was a teacher. Although Sharp was, by the time he encountered Neal, already making a name for himself as a folk song collector (despite having come to it relatively recently) and had already published several books on the subject: including a collection of Somerset songs in collaboration with the Rev. Charles Marson, and was working on a

95 Cox, 1993, 74. 96 Idem. 97 Idem (quoting a letter dated 19/10/1904 held in Sharp’s correspondance at the VWML). 98 Fox-Strangways, 1933. 59 selection of songs for schools with Baring Gould. Yet his chief claim to fame at this time was still as a music teacher, and one of no little experience.

He had spent the best part of a decade in Australia, teaching violin and piano, leading several choirs and choral societies, and had spent a period as co-director of the Adelaide College of Music before a dispute with Herr Reimann, his fellow director, led to them parting company.99 On his return to England, having failed to garner much interest in publishing his music, he took conductorship of the Finsbury Choral association, and spent four years teaching and conducting at the Metropolitan College in Holloway, before he resigned as a matter of principle after another dispute. He had a brief involvement with the setting up of a new progressive school (The King Alfred School, Hampstead), established along ‘Rational Lines’ to put into practice the radical reforming ideas of Froebel, Herbart and others.100 Music formed a strong part of the curriculum; whole class singing was a daily activity. Sharp felt obliged to resign after three years, after siding with the outgoing headmaster in a dispute with the school council. From here, Sharp took on the role of principal at the Hampstead conservatoire, having forged links with the establishment during his time at the nearby King Alfred’s. It should be noted that at the time he met Neal, he had just resigned as Principal after a protracted dispute with the Conservatoire’s owner, and was thus confined to his study. His longest held post (and seemingly his happiest) was eighteen years as music master at the prestigious Ludgrove School, a prep school for Eton, where he taught part time from 1896. In 1904 his reputation was such that he was appointed tutor to the Royal children—twelve in all, including the future king— teaching them twice weekly.101 Sharp was working in the highest tier of music educators in the years prior to his engagement with folk arts, but he was also showing himself to be somewhat difficult to work alongside.

1.5.2 Against England’s Stigma as das Land Ohne Musik

Carl Engel’s 1866 publication on the study of national music posited the notion that English music lacked a ‘marked national character’, which made the English more likely to adopt the music of other nations.102 Tellingly, he cites the Germans as the example of a nation more resistant to such imports. He did allow for the notion that England’s remote rural areas may still ‘preserve songs and dances of their own, inherited from their forefathers’, but lamented

99 Fox-Strangways, 1933, 8-12. 100 Cox, 1993, 140-2. 101 Ibid, 142. See also Fox-Strangways 1933, 51-53. 102 Engel, 1866, 3. 60 the lack of published evidence, as this music had ‘hitherto not been carefully collected’. 103 Engel was not the first of his countrymen to write disparagingly of English musical ability. Georg Weerth, poet and associate of , spent several years in the north of England. In his travel writings, he expressed his surprise that such a powerful nation could produce so little musical talent. He maintained that ‘the Englishman can neither sing or play’, only ever learned two or three songs in his lifetime, and was more likely to become a millionaire than ‘learn how to hold a tune in his head’.104 Such critique would continue into the following century, with Das Land Ohne Music being the title of an Anglophobic polemic by Oscar Adolf Hermann Schmitz, first published in 1904.105 ‘The land without music’ was not a phrase coined by Schmitz’s, and has been attributed to others including the conductor Hans von Bülow (1830-1894). Whether such statements were ever an accurate reflection of English musical life is debatable; certainly by Schmitz’ time such remarks are questionable in the light of extant works by Elgar. The significance (as Gammon points out) is that a myth had been established which an influential portion of English society believed to be true.106

One such believer was Cecil Sharp. He maintained strongly, after the ideas of Herder and Engel, that the great art music of each nation was rooted in its folk music, and it was this that gave each music its national character. This was possible because genuine folk song was always an expression of the pure national spirit, being, as Sharp believed, the unconscious products of the collective minds of the unlettered peasantry, whose poetry was unsullied by foreign influence; the songs ‘springing like wild flowers from the hearts [of the] peasantry’107 The Englishman’s lack of familiarity with his own musical heritage was, to Sharp, manifestly the reason that no first rate had been produced in England since Purcell, as, in emulating Italian or German styling, the home-grown composer was simply ‘lisping in the tongue of the foreigner’.108 His earnest wish was to lay the foundation for an English national school of composition, preferably along the lines of the German school that he particularly favoured, but it was not simply a case of introducing the newly discovered repertoire to existing composers:

103 Engl, 1866, 73. 104 Georg Weerth, A Young Revolutionary in Nineteenth Century England, Selected Writings of Georg Weerth (Berlin: Seven Seas Books, 1971). 105 Oscar A. H. Schmitz, Das land Ohne Musik: Englische Gesellschaftsprobleme (Munich, 1904). NB: Gesellschaftsprobleme translates (loosely) as ‘social problem’. Gesellschaft refers specifically to formal, impersonal social groupings. 106 Gammon, 1980, 75. 107 Sharp, 1907, 74. 108 Idem. 61 It is not enough to ‘play with local colour’. Brahms did not write Hungarian Music when he borrowed Hungarian themes. Nor did Beethoven write Russian Quartets when he made use of Russian folk songs. Both Brahms and Beethoven wrote German music always, because they were German and had been brought up in the traditions of German music. Similarly, the English musician will not necessarily write English music simply by going to English folk music for his themes. It is highly desirable that he should do so; what effect it has on him will be in the right direction, and it will, at least, aid in popularizing English folk song. But an English school of music is not going to be founded that way. For that we must wait for the younger generations to be familiarized with folk song. We must leave it to them to restore English music to its rightful position…[my emphasis]109

Thus it was vital to Sharps long term plans for the rejuvenation of the English national music to begin introducing English children to their folk traditions in as comprehensive a way as possible, and the most effective avenue to Sharp’s mind was to introduce it into schools. He also believed that folk songs were the ideal musical form for the school child to study, being the perfect balance between the high musical quality and the all-important accessibility that he considered the twin goals of school music.

…Folk song is the ideal musical food for very young children. Folk songs most certainly belong to the category of good music; they are natural, pure and simple. They are, moreover, attractive to children, easily comprehended and easily learned by them.110

Furthermore, children brought up on a healthy diet of their own national folk music—and he stressed that the chosen songs must be of their own nationality, as even Scottish and Irish music would not do for English children or vice versa—would lead them to reject the shallow outpourings of the music hall, and a revival in national good taste would follow. It would also lead, when taught in conjunction with national sports, folk dances, folk tales and (most importantly) the mother tongue, to a stronger class of patriotic English citizens. It was these assertions that lead Sharp to his radical proposal to the board of education—not only should folk songs be introduced into Elementary schools with all haste, they should also form the only basis of musical instruction that children were to receive, abandoning all technical instruction until secondary school (including the notation skills that formed the cornerstone of music tuition at the time). This was not a suggestion amenable to Somervell, and was another cause of tension between the two men.111

109 Sharp 1907, 169-70. 110 Ibid, 171. 111 Cox, 1993, 144. 62 In his Pamphlet Folk Singing in Schools, published late in 1913, Sharp set out his case once again, with much of the material reworked from English Folk Song: Some Conclusions although this time with an eye to how folk song should actually be taught within the school system. He also sought to pre-empt his critics by writing a robust defence of his ideals, especially in regard to the charge that folk song texts held an essentially illiterate character that was inappropriate for schooling, and the notion that folksongs, having all but died out, were a spent force.

The main thrust of his pedagogical argument was that folk songs were easy to learn, despite their apparent complexities for two reasons:

(1)Its rhythmical irregularities, modal tonality, etc., being the inevitable characteristics of natural, unselfconsciously created music, present no difficulties to the unspoiled minds of children, especially when the music is only heard, and not seen [in notated form] by them;(2) the songs are racial, i.e. they are couched in a musical idiom which must be the natural for of expression for the children of those who created it; and just as it is easier for English children to learn their own language rather than a foreign one, so it will be found simpler to teach children the music of their own country than that of any other.112

The words of folk songs were also especially suited to schools as, the text being of greater import than the melody to the traditional singer, there was rarely more than one note to be sung per syllable, which made good enunciation easier to achieve. Furthermore, as the words were normally unselfconscious and impersonal, they left no room for the child ‘intruding his personality’. These two factors made folk song especially suitable for unison singing. He also stressed that, as folk songs were in a state of continual evolution, the texts were far more modern in tone (and thus relevant and accessible) than the antiquity of the tune would suggest.

The actual teaching method, which Sharp acknowledged would meet with initial resistance from teachers who felt it beneath them, was to be simply singing the song line by line, with the children singing each line back until they learned it, at which point they should be allowed to sing it as they saw fit. The teacher’s role after this was ‘to confine himself to insisting upon (1) the accuracy of words and tune, (2) the clear enunciation of the text, (3) the suppression of all shouting and the production of a natural, easy and full tone’.113 Exceptions to this ‘hands off’ approach were that spontaneous dramatic gestures from the children should be strongly

112 Cecil Sharp, Folk Singing In Schools, (Pamphlet, London, 1913), 14. 113 Sharp, 1913, 18. 63 discouraged, as should dramatic effects in the music itself (Rubato, crescendo etc), as these were not part of the naturally restrained performance style appropriate to the songs.114

Again, his precedent is the German system, where learning folk and National songs by rote constituted the whole of music education until the age of 11, which resulted in ‘the average musical taste [being] immeasurably higher than in England’. Cultivating good musical taste was of much more educational value than focusing on technical proficiency, as it was the lack of taste, not technical expertise, that had lead to the paucity of native art music. His evidence for this was that ‘There is no country in Europe where vulgar music flourishes as it does in England’.115

In the Companion pamphlet, Folk Dance in Schools, he presented very similar arguments, stating his main reasons for its introduction:

1. The practice of an art stimulates feeling and develops the imaginative faculty, thereby counteracting any ill effects which may result from an excess of brain- work.

2. Dancing promotes physical culture in an easy and efficient manner; easy, because, being presented as an amusement, it is pleasurable; efficient, because physical actions performed under the stimulus of emotion, naturally and unselfconsciously, are less calculated to produce a stiff, wooden and mechanical bearing than those that are executed, in response to the word of command, for the sole purpose of developing the body.

3. Properly taught, dancing, though a recreation, inculcates the valuable lesson that discipline and restraint are needed in play no less than in work.

4. In the folk dances of their own nation children have a form of artistic expression which must, from their very nature, be especially suited to them.116

He was clear that the Morris was an advanced dance form that should, by preference, be danced by men (female morris was only ever an approximation of the ‘real’ thing), and that

114 Sharp, 19. 115 Ibid, 9. 116 Sharp, Cecil, Folk Dance In Schools, (Pamphlet, London, 1913?). 64 country dances were best suited for general exercise. Sword Dances were always to be danced by men, and would be particularly suited to boys, whose usual aversion to dancing would be overcome by the chance to hold a sword.117

A real concern for Sharp was that the exuberant dancing style of the Espérance girls (which Sharp later derided as hoydenish and chaplinesque) would be alarming to the more conservative elements whose approval he needed in order to implement the insertion of folk song and dance into the school curriculum. To prevent this, he felt the need to take control of the movement himself, thus ensuring that the ‘correct’ path be steered. The difficulty lay in the fact that the Espérance girls were the only available teachers, and were already working the length of the country to considerable acclaim. He needed his own staff, trained after his ideals, and to this end established a morris dancing course at the Chelsea Physical Training College. This accomplished, he wrote to Neal in 1909 (their relationship was already strained at this point), accusing her of:

… deliberately isolated yourself from and refused to associate yourself with those who were better acquainted with the subject than yourself and animated by higher artistic ideals than your own. Seeing the danger I very naturally took steps to avert it with the result that I have now a staff of teachers at my command (who) in my opinion are far better qualified to spread the morris than are the members of your club. I am very sorry for Florrie and her fellow workers. I do not blame them. I blame you and I blame you very bitterly for refusing to allow them to be properly directed and controlled.

Already the opinion is getting about that the morris dance is a graceless, undignified and uncouth dance quite unfit for educational uses… I am not going to stand idly by any longer and allow you to make or mar the fortunes of the movement.118

In 1910, Neal had felt obliged to resign her directorship of the Folk-Dance Summer School at Stratford upon Avon (which had been transferred from original Espérance venture at Littlehampton at the request of the memorial Theatre’s governors) after trenchant public criticism from Sharp (and heated responses on her part) lead to the suggestion that a conference to establish a compromise position was vital to prevent the movement tearing itself apart. This appears to have been a ruse on the part of the Sharpian camp however, as Sharp was installed as director in 1911, whilst the conference was delayed until 1912, at which time the debate was meaningless—Sharp was in possession of the school, and his new teachers, with their certificates from the Chelsea Training College (which Neal referred to as

117 Sharp, Folk Dance In Schools, 1913(?). 118 Judge, 1989, 559. (Following letter quoted: Sharp to Neal, 26/07/1909, Sharp correspondence, box 5, VWML). 65 ‘the West London Polytechnic), were in the place of Neal’s girls. This was not the only seeming act of subterfuge against Neal, as folk song and dance were admitted to the school curriculum whilst she was giving a lecture tour in the United States, which, to add insult to injury, Sharp had deliberately sabotaged, contacting every single one of her engagements to tell them that she was widely discredited in England and should not be allowed to speak!119 Sharp had achieved his goal.

Whilst no records appear to have survived of what Neal, Carey and Warren had taught at the 1910 summer school (although Neal believed that ‘about 200 had availed themselves of the opportunity’120) there is a newspaper report of the first Sharp led venture in 1911.121 Whilst William Kimber was prevailed upon to give a display of Morris ‘in order that the students may see how the Morris was traditionally executed’ on one occasion over the six-week period that the classes ran, all instruction in dance was delivered by Sharp’s new teaching staff, including the Karpeles sisters.122 Maud would later be Sharp’s collecting companion in the Appalachians and his posthumous champion in prose, whilst Helen would go on to marry Sharp’s appointed successor Douglas Kennedy. Dance notation was also taught in basic form. Several competition-winning sides of dancers were also called upon to give displays. Singing class was held every morning at ten, with songs demonstrated by Miss Matty Kay (another Sharp protégé), and then sung in unison from supplied notation by the entire class. In between the songs, Sharp gave short talks on their meaning and use in the elementary school, including his views on how each should be taught. Sharp also delivered two or three full lectures per week. The aim was expressly to produce teachers who could further the cause of Folk-song and dance from within the education system.

1.6 Neal and Sharp in Contrast

The conflict between Neal and Sharp has been retrospectively dismissed as irrelevant to the development of the folk song movement, as the conflict was about dance.123 As demonstrated above, the two concepts were interlinked in the minds of the protagonists at the time, and it

119 Neal, As a tale that is told, 161-2. 120 Kidson & Neal, 1915, 115. 121 Anon, ‘The Stratford-on-Avon Summer School of Folk-Song and Dance’, Musical Times. 52/824 (Oct 1 1911), 651-654. 122 Both sisters can be seen dancing (along with Sharp and ) in some Kinora film reels, which constitute the first video evidence of English folk dance on film: Jugosling, ‘The Kinora Films’, online video clip, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQEkXMCusuI, 26 Sept. 2010 (23/10/17). For analysis, see Gammon, 2008. No such footage of Florrie Warren or other Nealite dancers has yet come to light. 123 Dean-Smith, 1954. 66 was only later revisionists who sought to downplay Neal’s role in the wider revival in order to bolster Sharp’s standing as the primary instigator of the movement: a role which Sharp and his successors could still have legitimately laid claim to without denigrating the contributions of others. The Esperance Club had only come upon folk dance as an accompaniment to the folk song they were already using in their work, and for Sharp the project of reviving the English national character was not segregated by art form; song and dance were indivisibly part of his overarching vision for folk education, both leading toward the same goal.

The split between the two camps may have been unavoidable. Sharp’s career is marked by numerous insurmountable conflicts with colleagues. From his early disagreement with Herr Reimann in Adelaide onwards, including the various conflicts with school boards and governors that saw him dismissed by several employers, and his repeated clashes with Somervell and the BoE over teaching material, Sharp displayed an unusually intractable and belligerent need to establish his own rectitude, often at the expense of his own friendships and livelihood. Neal was not the first collaborator in the folk arts that Sharp was no longer able to work alongside (although the nature of his conflict with the Rev. Marson remains unknown). Rather than being a mere expression of egocentricity, it would seem that Sharp had a genuine need for an opponent to define his ideas against. Many of the pivotal decisions and defining moments in his career arose through crisis, whether during one of his bouts of prolonged illness or through one of his many protracted ideological conflicts.

The Nealite pedagogical framework, whilst loose and adaptive by its very nature, had a strong set of guiding principles rather than specific pre-defined practices. Firstly, a strong emphasis was placed on the experiential value of the material: it was the doing that counted, the ‘getting into the spirit’ of it. Fundamental to this was the idea that it should be an uplifting and joyous experience “otherwise we have only added to the burdens of life”.124 The material was always subservient to the needs of the users. If slight alterations occurred during the users’ adaption of the material, then this was entirely natural, healthy, and in keeping with the nature of tradition. As she said of the Morris dance, “if folk-dancing has evolved through all these countless generations, who shall fix the exact moment when evolution ceased and the steps and evolutions became fixed and unalterable?”.125 Despite this, she believed in the primacy of the traditional source, placing the learner directly in contact with the traditional practitioner whenever possible. This was, for Neal, the only authentic way to pass the material on.

124 Neal, 1911, 12. 125 Kidson & Neal, 1915, 115. 67

It should be emphasised that folk arts were simply one part of Neal’s greater mission: to improve the lot of the working class. She was dedicated to this greater cause first and foremost, seeing it as both her civic and religious duty give her life to those less fortunate than herself, whether this was achieved via improved wages and working conditions, or through the provision of wholesome leisure activities. Her educational model was arrived at in an effort to allow the folk arts to support this endeavour, whilst the material remaining in the possession of (and ultimately under the control of) those she sought to help. In an interview given to the Musical Herald in 1911, Neal succinctly summarised her motivation:

Unless it is of civic value, it is not worth my while to give my life to it. As a big national movement, as I believe it is, it will have great civic effect; it will put boys and girls with the real rhythm of the country, and it will re-energise them. This movement originated with the people, and if any who are not of the ‘folk’ wish to practice it, they must reverently learn from the people.126

The Nealite philosophy can be said to imply an educational model that is peer led (lateral) and focussed on the experience.

In contrast, Sharp’s pedagogical approach, heavily influenced by his profession as a schoolteacher, was far more structured, rigid and, in fairness, more robustly developed than Neal’s. His emphasis was on capturing the aesthetic of the tradition. With Morris, Sharp expected to see a straightforward musicality of phrasing, existing in the narrow band between ‘too straight up and drilled’ and ‘too gymnastic’.127 Just as with the school singing, his insistence was on accuracy—just to do it was not enough, it had to be done right, in accordance with the aesthetics that Sharp imposed upon the material. He firmly believed that the music and dances contained the distilled essence of the nation who had created it—to alter it in any way was to damage the national heritage—and that he had the necessary expertise to safeguard this valuable repository of Englishness. Sharp’s authenticity was externally verified, ruled by the intellect, whereas for Neal it was internalised, focussing on the bodily experience of the self and how it felt to participate. For Sharp, the mediation (and thus Sharp the mediator) held primacy over the source itself, as only material that had been carefully prepared and properly taught could ensure the safety and purity of the tradition. The Sharpian approach can thus be summarised as: Expert led (Top Down), and focussed on the aesthetic.

126 Anon, ‘Americans Learning English Folk Music’, Musical Herald, 758 (1st May 1911), 134. 127 Gammon 2008, 90-91. 68 As the educational philosophies of the Sharpian and Nealite camps had developed in direct opposition to each other, their positions became polarised, each defining itself by the negative other. This was despite the fact that both held very similar ideals, in terms of the romantic notion of the benefit that folk music could and should provide for society. The deeply personal nature of their conflict certainly heightened the binary opposition. , a key Sharp supporter, attended a fancy dress party dressed as Neal, with a sign around his neck that read ‘Power before Accuracy’.128 It is interesting to note that the opposition could be reduced to a summary in just two words, yet still remain recognisable to those directly involved at the time. Judge provides several more such characterisations: Sharp’s emphasis on ‘technique’ is contrasted with the Nealite focus on the ‘spirit’, Sharp valued ‘form’ but Neal privileged ‘content’.129 Robert Snape posits that Sharp was creating ‘art’, whereas Neal wanted Morris as an activity for ‘leisure’.130 To these, I would add my own: Sharp’s ‘expert’ led, ‘exclusive’, ‘cerebral’ and ‘formal’ approach contrasted with Neal’s ‘peer’ led, ‘inclusive’, ‘embodied’ and deliberately ‘informal’ stance (see Table 1, below, for summary).

Table 1: Sharp Vs Neal Sharp’s Approach Versus Neal’s Approach Accuracy Power Technique Spirit Form Content Art Leisure “Top Down”, expert led “Lateral”, peer led Cerebral Embodied Formalised Informal Fixed Nature Fluid Nature

Of course such polarisation is not inherent in folk music and dance, nor is it necessarily productive to enforce such a split; Sharp and Neal produced their best and most influential work on dance during their brief period of co-operation, before their energies were expended in

128 Ursula Vaughan-Williams, RVW: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams (London: Oxford University Press, 1964). This incident is alluded to by Judge (1989, 570) and on the timeline on the Mary Neal Project website: http://www.maryneal.org/chapter/1905-11914/1004/ (23/10/17). Both place the probable year as 1912 (although I expect the website follows Judge in this regard), and Judge places it as mid-autumn, possibly suggesting a hallowe’en gathering. 129 Judge, 1989, 545-6, 577. 130 Robert Snape 'Continuity, change and performativity in leisure: English folk dance and modernity 1900- 1939', Leisure Studies, 28/3 (2009), 297-311 (5). 69 opposition. Both approaches are in fact extreme archetypes of teaching methods already embedded in the traditions of the British Isles. Sharp’s ‘top-down’ expert led approach can be found in any master-apprentice model of traditional learning, whereas Neal, with her peer-led ‘lateral’ approach, was deliberately attempting to emulate the communal learning she saw amongst ‘the folk’.

1.6.1 Aftermath and Legacy

It was not until after the Great War that Sharp’s total victory became apparent. Neal’s club was forced to close, and she did not rekindle the Espérance Morris Guild after the war, noting that “…in 1918 it was impossible to begin again. The world had changed”.131 Her role in folk revival was all but forgotten, largely due to supporters of Sharp simply omitting to mention her role in their accounts of the period. This was apparent even during her lifetime. In 1928, Neal attended a meeting about the establishment of a branch of Sharp’s English Folk Dance Society (the direct rival to her former guild) in Sussex. She was incensed by the inaccuracies of the account that Sharp’s successor Douglas Kennedy gave of the revival, and found nobody prepared even to speak to her.132

Her absence in the ‘official’ accounts remained until the 1980s, when researchers such as Dommett and Judge made an effort to rehabilitate her reputation. Perhaps the only gesture of official recognition she received was that she was awarded the CBE for her services to folk dance: her old friends the Pethick-Lawrences had much influence in such the matters. She lived until 1944, still engaged in philanthropic work, taking public opinion surveys for the Gallup poll during the war. Apart from an invitation to watch the Abingdon Morris side in 1938, she made very few forays into the world of folk music after the demise of her beloved club—for her, there would have been little point.133

Sharp too, despite spending much of the War years collecting in the Appalachian mountains, had felt loss: four of his usual six-man Morris demonstration side were killed in action, amongst them the composer and song collector George Butterworth, and pioneer of folk drama studies, collector Robert J Tiddy.134 In 1919, Sharp was appointed to a part time post as an HMI, with specific duties in inspecting the provision of folk dance training for elementary

131 Judge, 1989, 574. 132 Ibid, 576. 133 Judge, 1989, 577. 134 R. J. Tiddy, The Mummer’s Play (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), 57-59. 70 school teachers.135 His notes show that he was still active in criticising what he saw as bad habits. The training schools continued, growing in popularity until in 1922 the Christmas school in London required a motor-bus service to move the 578 students between the outlaying accommodation and the central area for training.136 Sharp’s health was failing him however, and in 1924 he was taken severely ill whilst judging folk dance competitions in Yorkshire and Newcastle, and died three weeks later.

Despite the loss of Sharp, the use of Folk song and dance in schools continued unabated, with both Oxford and Cambridge University presses producing extensive series of suitable material, as did the publishers Curwen and Novello. In 1932 Sharp’s Folk Dance Society merged with the Folk Song Society to form the current English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS). Its headquarters were in the building that had been purchased by subscription as Sharp’s Memorial. Over time the material being used began to stagnate (the Oxford School Music book of 1970 was a reprint of a book that was first published in 1954), and the use of folk arts in schools began to dwindle. The inflexibility and formalism of the victorious Sharpian orthodoxy led to a gradual ossification of the movement, and an increasing irrelevance to educational thought as it failed to adapt to the times. In the words of Gordon Cox, ‘there was no scope for development: folk song had become an educational dead-end’.137

135 Gammon, 2008. 136 Fox-Strangways, 1933. 137 Cox, 1993, 161. 71 Chapter 2: Between The Wars: Competitive Folk Music and the BBC’s Schools Programme

This chapter examines two significant inter-war developments that were to impact the ways in which folk music was made accessible in Britain, both of which were to build upon the educational legacies imparted by Cecil Sharp and Mary Neal. The first of these developments to be examined —the music competition festival movement developed by the singer Mary Wakefield— was significant in that it brought folk music greater mainstream exposure by placing it within the same events as art music. More importantly, it did so within a controlled meta-pedagogical framework designed to promote a positive and communally rewarding experience for all those participating in the festival. By focusing on managing the nature of the overall experience to ensure positive engagement from the participants, Mary Wakefield’s competition festivals not only continued some legacy of Mary Neal’s experiential focus on folk music education, but also presaged later developments by Folkworks and their contemporaries, for whom the careful framing of their events was key to their success.

The second development to be examined is the rise of the BBC’s schools radio service, which had a significant impact on the number of children able to experience folk music participation in British schools. In particular, this chapter looks at the long-running programme Singing Together, which was to begin by using folk song extensively as part of an accessible curriculum for whole class singing, and went on to do so for almost six decades. Radio technology allowed unprecedented reach and consistency, delivering identical tuition to many thousands of school children nationwide simultaneously. The surprising popularity and longevity of the show achieved one of Sharp’s greatest educational ambitions; mass folk music education for a significant percentage of the nation’s school children became a reality, albeit a reality which entailed significant compromise.

For folk music education, the years following the First World War were characterised by consolidation of the inroads made into the realm of mainstream education during the pre-war boom; continuing innovation and expansion were no longer the priority. With Sharp having effectively silenced his most vocal critics, it was his vision, largely unopposed, that would dominate the way folk music was used in schools during the inter-war years. In fact, Sharp’s methodology was fortuitously complimentary to some of the major changes taking place within the wider music curriculum. An increasingly influential Board Of Education had

72 championed a move away from music lessons in which the pupil was a passive observer; instead, the Board encouraged schools towards a student body actively engaged with the making of music, after Somervell’s drive for more ear and rhythm training.1 Seeking to establish not only what should ideally be taught in schools, but also to asses the reality of what was actually taking place in British classrooms, the BoE commissioned a series of inquiries, lead by Sir Henry Hadow, into the state of national education, including A Consultative Committee on the Education of the Adolescent in 1924. The report, published two years later in 1926, is commonly referred to as the Hadow Report, although confusingly the Consultative Committee produced six reports under Hadow between 1923 and 1933, any of which could legitimately claim that title. The most influential suggestion to arise from the 1926 report was the suggested division of the Nation’s schooling into primary and secondary tiers, with the break at age 11. Although somewhat overshadowed by this major recommendation, music education featured significantly in the report; the goal of a music teacher was to instill good musical taste into their charges, using only music of ‘the first-rate of it kind’, with the aim that their musical experiences in school should ‘lay the foundation for the intelligent study and enjoyment of music in later life’.2 Singing and aural training were to be central to this policy, and, despite his death in 1924, the considerable volume of folk material published by Cecil Sharp was to provide a major part of that repertoire, having been expressly designed for use in such a fashion.

The Cambridgeshire Report on the Teaching of Music, published in 1933, is another useful source of evidence for actual music teaching practice in the inter-war years.3 A detailed examination of the music education practice at county level, it had been written by an influential committee: such educational luminaries as Sir Arthur Somervell, Sir Henry Hadow, Sir John B McEwan (Principle of Royal Academy of Music), Dr Geoffrey Shaw (who had replaced over from Somervell as HM Principal Inspector of Music) as well as head teachers and music masters at a number of respected schools were amongst the contributing authorities. In general terms, the committee expresses its pleasure with the wider acceptance of music into the curriculum:

To advocate the inclusion of music as an essential subject of education is, at the present day, to beat at an open door. The old barriers of neglect and disdain have

1 Stephanie Pitts, A Century of Change in Music Education: Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Practice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 14-16. 2 Ibid, 15. 3 ‘Written by Committee’, Music and the Community: The Cambridgeshire Report on the Teaching of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933). Hereafter referred to as ‘Cambridgeshire Report, 1933’, as neither authors name or ‘anon.’ can be given for a more standard shortform citation. 73 fallen and will not be re-erected. Our educational range has grown wider, its aim has grown more liberal and more intelligent; in the general advance music has come to take an acknowledged place, and its progress is welcomed with sympathy and good will.4

As with the 1926 Hadow report, the stated role of music teachers is not to train a generation of virtuosi, but to create an accessible curriculum: ‘The principal aim is to establish a general musical culture which all alike, in their several degrees, can turn to account … open to all who can learn to listen and understand’.5 Included are several example schemes of work for different age ranges, with a common theme of a heavy reliance on whole class singing, ear- training and use of tonic sol fa notation running throughout: ‘voice, ear and eye’ are the three main categories of work to be undertaken regardless of the age of the pupils.6 As before, folk song looms large amongst the material suggested as suitable for schools use: the committee provides extensive lists of what it considers to be appropriate, again broken down by age group. For infants and Junior Schools, twenty-one selections of suitable ‘traditional’ material are suggested, including Kidson’s British Nursery Rhymes, and four Novello publications either authored or co-authored by Sharp.7 For older children, listed under ‘Schools, Colleges and General use’, folk song makes up a lesser percentage, with just over twenty percent consisting of folk song in some form (twenty-three of one hundred and two selections). These included four volumes of shanties/chanties (two of which are by Sharp), one book of folk carols (also by Sharp), a number of European, Balkan and Scandinavian folk songs (eleven in total) and fourteen British folk song suggestions (of which five had Sharp credited as editor, collector or co-editor). Both the figure of Sharp and his grand vision for folk song in schools were clearly still of considerable influence, again aided by the fact that his material still fitted the prevailing teaching style, especially for younger students.

Change was on the horizon, however; the committee would prove prescient in highlighting two issues that would have considerable bearing on future folk music education. Advances in technology brought about the first of these changes: the Gramophone and Wireless had made music, especially larger scale orchestral works, more accessible and portable than ever before. This was a source of concern for the Committee, who were keen to stress that recorded or broadcast music should be supporting, rather than replacing active musical participation: ‘…the committee have observed, with some apprehension, the enormous increase in the passive participation of music which has been made possible by the gramophone and

4 Cambridgeshire Report, 1933, 1. 5 Idem. 6 Ibid, 21-29. 7 Ibid, 191-196. 74 broadcasting’.8 Never the less, they were cautiously optimistic that the player-piano, gramophone and wireless could take up a valid place in the classroom. The BBC’s ‘enlightened policy’ was praised for ‘markedly raising musical standards’ by playing an improving diet of ‘good music’, rather than ‘the tune or sentimental ballad’ so reviled by Sharp and Somervell alike.9 In 1933, the BBC were already broadcasting weekly music lessons into schools, as set out by the Music Committee for the Central Council of Schools Broadcasting, taking the form of a two tiered course, broadcast as thirty half hour lessons yearly, divided evenly so as to provide ten per school term.10 The BBC also produced accompanying booklets for these shows, intended to be in each student’s hand for reference during broadcasts. Additionally, a special programme of forty-five minute concerts for schools was broadcast on Fridays during term time to reinforce the taste building aspect of the corporation’s brief.11 These were just the beginnings of the impact of the wireless in Britain’s schools; it was not until the outbreak of war that the BBC’s role in both schools and folk music dissemination was to reach its full potential.

The other new development to particularly impress the Cambridgeshire committee was the rapid expansion of the musical competition festival: a movement pioneered by Mary Wakefield during the closing years of the 19th century. In the space of a decade, it had grown from a local to a national phenomenon, and one the committee now held to of particular importance, as it furthered the appointed mission of schools to promote practical engagement with quality music.

{The Musical Competition Festival} is now one of the most vital forms of musical activity in the country and doing great work in improving performance and public taste. No other events outside of school life bring so many people into practical contact with good music.12

This not only provided an outlet for school leavers to continue participating in music in the manner they had been taught at school, but also as a useful experience for school-age children to engage with on weekends or during holidays. These events were very much in keeping with both the BoE and BBC views of a socially responsible use of music, with all three reinforcing the cultural position of the others. Despite the name, the competitive nature was not the aspect that appealed to the Cambridgeshire Committee, but rather one of the key secondary tenets of the movement, which was to involve all the competitors together in rehearsing and

8 Cambridgeshire Report, 1933, xiv. 9 Ibid, 115. 10 Ibid, 114. 11 Ibid, 112-113. 12 Ibid, 155. 75 performing a mass choral work for the public: participation in the cooperative work was often a mandatory part of entering the competitions. Initially this measure was introduced to ameliorate hostility between groups competing for the same prizes, but it quickly became the crowning focus of the festivals. The Committee made their approval of this development clear:

Of late years a type of festival has developed (especially in the south of England) in which the competitive element is kept more or less in the background, and the activities of all are concentrated on the combined performance of a big work. […] We feel that from an educational point of view this is a very important move.13

These two developments, the rise of the BBC’s schools programme and the popularity of the competition festival, were to have considerable influence on the way the public engaged with folk music education, whether in schools or in adult life. Each can be seen as exploring and furthering aspects of one side of the Sharp/Neal dichotomy, showing that the both approaches still had relevance and possibility during the interwar years, leaving the conflict potential to re-open. Although the lifespans of the two competition festival and the BBC schools programme are not exactly contemporaneous —the competition festival’s popularity waned after the Second Word War, whereas the BBC’s school radio programming was to maintain educational influence into the 1990s—the fact that the Cambridgeshire Report deemed them to both be of special significance in the 1930s shows that they were seen as relevant and innovative during the inter-war period. Neither occurred in a pedagogical vacuum, however, so establishing the wider historical and educational context is necessary to properly situate each of the developments. Section 2.1 (below) will establish a brief history of competitive folk music within the British Isles, before section 2.2 gives an overview of the competition music festival’s development, and examines the life and work of its founder, Mary Wakefield. Section 2.3 looks at the ways in which the development of wireless broadcasting in the UK lead to the founding of a unique institution— the British Broadcasting Corporation— and how the remit of this new organization impacted the development of broadcast music lessons, with section 2.4 highlighting the particular significance of the show Singing Together. A decade-by-decade breakdown and analysis of Singing Together’s output follows, examining the ways in which folk music was used throughout the show’s lengthy period on air.

13 Cambridgeshire Report, 1933, 156. 76 2.1 Competitive Folk Music

During the same period as the first folk revival in England, another strand of folk music education was undergoing a period a development: competitive folk music. Despite many of the same figures being involved in both movements, competition did not significantly interact directly with the main educational thrust of the revival, but developed alongside it. This movement represents a seeming paradox, as a once communal, informal activity emerged into a formalised system of competition. Competing for prizes or prestige in folk music was not a recent invention — it had existed in Britain and Ireland in various forms for some time—but the formalisation, codification and establishment of regulating bodies were mostly late Victorian developments; the Eisteddfodau in Wales, the various competitive bagpipe traditions, particularly in the Scottish highlands and North East England, and the musical championships of Ireland all had an existence prior to the English folk revival, but each went through a period of revival and renewal of their own in the late 19th and early 20th centuries which roughly coincided with the folk revival. Before examining the innovation of Mary Wakefield’s collaborative competition movement that was highlighted in the Cambridgeshire report, a brief overview of the competitive aspects of folk music that both preceded and developed in parallel with it.

There are several generalizations that can be broadly applied to all the pre-existing movements before examining the specifics of each tradition separately. Firstly, the underlying romantic Nationalist leanings of the age, as discussed in the previous chapter were once again a contributing factor in these moves to secure and promote regional and national musical heritage, and individuals within each movement have variously attempted to trace their activity back to a tradition descended from quasi-mythical antiquity before recorded history: rather than attempting to asses the validity of these claims, each movement will be examined from its verifiable documented starting point. Secondly, the cultural identities of North East England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland are all conceived of as being other to the dominant culture of the English south, providing both an incentive to define and preserve their respective cultural heritage, and a negative cultural other to define themselves against. Thirdly, all of these movements continue in some form until the present day, a brief overview of the current activity will be included below. Finally, the aim of all of these competitive movements is to both maintain the tradition and to provide incentives for consistently high playing standards.

77 2.1.1 Wales and the Eisteddfodau

Although there are claims laid to ancient origins within the bardic traditions dating back to the late twelfth century, the revived tradition became formalized as ‘The National Eisteddfod of Wales’ in 1880 after a number of false starts and setbacks in the previous decades (the current governing body dates itself from 1861). The new National Eisteddfod Association’s duty was to implement national Eisteddfodau annually, lasting a full week, with the locations alternating between North and South Wales to avoid any further conflicts within the movement. A travelling festival, which ‘belongs to the people of Wales—wherever they live’ any city, town or area could potentially play host to the Eisteddfod. A large area of open ground is transformed into the Meas, or festival ground, with a large pavilion erected for the events (in 1919 it was reputed to seat 10,000), trade stalls and other attractions.14 Very occasionally a diasporic Welsh community has played host to the event: Liverpool was chosen in 1900 and London in 1909. The principal aim of the Eisteddfod is to promote and culture, and to that end the language of the Eisteddfod is Welsh. This focus is total: in 2011, for example, even the form needed to book a plot on the caravan site for the national event was only available in Welsh. Within this constraint, there are numerous and varied categories of competition, including folk and choral music, but also literature, visual arts and latterly even awards for science. Medals are awarded for the main prizes, but monetary rewards are also common, although not necessarily foremost in the mind of the competitors. An exhaustive, four page report from the Musical Times of the 1919 Eisteddfod, held in Corwen, describes the winners of the main open choral event, a group of 141 singers and their conductor:

The Ammanford choir had been travelling from 6am until they entered the pavilion in the afternoon, singing fourth instead of first as announced. Their Journey cost £300, and the prize was £75. Leaving the unsatisfactory balance sheet to take care of itself, they carried their conductor round the field in triumph.15

The associated prestige, then, is the key to the continuing appeal of the festivals, with larger festivals having a greater draw due to the greater potential stature of the winners. The most renowned of Eisteddfod prizes is ‘The Chair’– both a bespoke item of functional furniture made especially each year and a trophy of great symbolic importance—awarded for poetry by

14 William Child ‘The National Welsh Eisteddfod’, The Musical Times, 60/919 (Sep. 1, 1919), 472-476. 15 Ibid. The amount mentioned may seem insignificant at first glance, but it should be noted that this would equate to a loss of over £8,000 in 2015: this gives a better picture of the true prestige value of the prize. 78 the (council) of , an order that the winner is ceremonially inducted into during ‘the chairing of the bard’ at the climax of the festivities at the Welsh National event. Although the National Eisteddfod of Wales is the most important and prestigious event of its type, other smaller festivals are celebrated both throughout Wales and in diasporic Welsh communities internationally: there are several large scale, national level events such as the dedicated Youth Eisteddfod, for example, but others are held at a local and even school level, perpetuating the notion of culture-as-competition, of which the folk plays a significant part.

2.1.2 Scotland and the Great Highland Bagpipes

Competition between players of the Great Highland bagpipes is a long tradition in Scotland, with both individuals and military style pipe bands competing, often in conjunction with a gathering for the Highland Games. Like the games, pinpointing an exact date of origin for piping competitions is practically impossible, as the origins of both are mired in romantic myth making.16 The modern form of both traditions was certainly well established by the mid 19th century (a competition of solo pipers at the 1781 Falkirk Cattle Tryste appears to be the earliest example on substantiated record). For solo performers, there are two distinct repertoires: ceòl mòr (the great or big music) and ceòl baeg (the little or lesser music). The former is the most prestigious repertoire, known as the Pìobaireachd (also rendered as in Lowland Scots); a virtuosic art music repertoire of themes and variations specific to the Highland pipes. It is passed down largely orally, through several distinct lineages of pipers, master and apprentice style; the transmission is by a complex series of chanted syllables, implying both note and ornament, known as , which serves as a form of audible notation. The ‘little music’ consists of dance tunes such as Marches, Strathspeys and Reels, and corresponds more closely to the wider folk repertoire of Scotland, as opposed to the art music complexity of the Pìobaireachd. The Competing Piper’s Association currently regulates solo competitions, regardless of repertoire. Contests are tiered according to ability, with a league system which tallies the overall scores from the year’s contests to establish an overall annual winner of each grade.17

The origin of the formal pipe bands is the military, with the having providing training and employment for many pipers serving from before the to the

16 Roderick D. Cannon, ‘What can we learn about piobaireachd?’ Ethnomusicology Forum, 4/1 (1995), 1-15 (1). 17 For details see: CPA, ‘B & C Grade Competition’, The Competing Piper’s Association, http://www.competingpipers.com/competition/ (23/1017). 79 present day. Civilian pipe bands in the military style in Scotland date to the later 1800s, although the oldest continuously surviving civilian band is now believed to be the Accrington of , England.18 The Royal Scottish Pipe Band Association (RSPBA) are the governing body for band competition, having been formed in 1930 to regulate the previously haphazard competition scene: at present, all members of competing bands must be members of the association for at least two weeks before being allowed to compete. The minimum personnel complement required for a competitive pipe band, at least in Major Championships, is twelve players: eight pipers, three side drummers and one : lower grade bands and juniors may have as few as eight players.19 In addition to their playing ability, bands are judged on their dress (there are uniform regulations to adhere to) and ability to march and maneuver with precision; judges are generally drawn from senior members of HM armed forces pipe bands, and prizes are awarded based on the overall performance of the band, with the band’s grade determining the level at which they compete.

Whether playing solo or in a pipe band, the competition scenes are the primary locations for the more specialist repertoires to be seen and heard by the public. Roderick D. Cannon suggests that since 1839 the majority of the pure Pìobaireachd heard by the wider public has been in a competition setting.20 Whilst pipe bands are also encountered in parades and military Tattoos, the chance to compare one band with another, or to witness a spectacular massed band is still most likely at a competition, often as part of a larger Highland Games event. Whilst the sound and image of the piper remain central to the image Scotland presents to the world, the competition scene is central to how the pipers present themselves to Scotland.

2.1.3 The Northumbrian Small Pipes

In the North East of England, players of the Northumbrian Small Pipes have a history of competing against each other; being a parlour instrument that favours virtuoso solo performance, the formalized competition serves to encourage and maintain high standards of

18 The society details this here: RSPBA, ‘Early civilian pipe bands’, The Royal Scottish Pipe Band Society, http://www.rspba.org/html/history_earlycivilian.php (23/10/17). 19 The rules can be viewed here: RSPBA, ‘Orders and Rules’The Royal Scottish Pipe Band Society, http://www.rspba.org/html/ordersandrules.php#SIX (23/10/17). Having consulted an experienced competing piper of my acquaintance, he believes there to be no regulated maximum size, but the largest band he has ever encountered had thirty-seven pipers in competition. He considers approximately twenty-five players to be the usual upper limit in practice for the higher-grade bands. 20 Cannon, 1995, 4. 80 individual musicianship amongst players. In the forward to The Northumbrian Minstrelsy, Bruce and Stokoe reported that players of Northumbrian Small Pipes were invited, as part of the Society for Antiquaries’ greater efforts to revive the local music in the 1880s, to compete in Newcastle town hall, and that ‘prizes were given to the best performers’.21 Shortly thereafter, ‘The Northumbrian Small Pipes Society' was inaugurated in 1893, stating their intentions ‘to encourage the art of playing the Northumbrian Small Pipes; to preserve the melodies peculiar to the English border, and to exhibit the musical pastimes of Sword Dancing, and the other traditional accompaniments of our Folk Music’.22 Although the organization oversaw formal competitions and encouraged the playing of the instrument, it was short-lived, with no official competitions after 1899. Despite the Duke of Northumberland retaining an official piper for ceremonial duties, and some competitions (at local agricultural shows for example), it was not until 1928 that another society was formed. Unlike their predecessor, the new ‘Northumbrian Piper’s Society’ also promotes the playing of the other bagpipe native to the region, the Border or Half-Long Pipes. Competitions are still held at the Chantry Bagpipe Museum in Morpeth during the annual Morpeth Gathering. Similar events in the region, such as those held at Newcastleton and , host competitions, as do agricultural shows such as Bellingham. In many cases, fiddle and other instruments also have competition categories, as do , poetry and song. With competitions tied so closely to local events that also celebrate local dialect, crafts, occupations and history, the Duke of Northumberland still retaining a piper for ceremonial purposes, the survivor status of being the only region specific left in England, the Northumbrian Small Pipes are central to conceptions of Northumbrian-ness.

2.1.4 Ireland: the Roots of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Êireann

Early precedents for competitive music within Ireland include the harp festivals of Granard between 1781-85 and the gathering of harpers in Belfast 1792, the latter of which was attended by a Mr. , who was entrusted with the role of notating the tunes played by the contestants, subsequently using them as a basis for his A General Collection of Ancient Irish Music in 1796.23 We know that the Harpers were competing for monetary prizes in all of these events, because the names of the players, the pieces they played, the order that

21 J. Collingwood Bruce & John Stokoe (eds.), Northumbrian Minstrelsy: A Collection of the Ballads, Melodies and Small-pipe Tunes of Northumbria (Newcastle: Society for Antiquaries of Newcastle, 1882). 22 NPS, ‘History’, The Northumbrian Piper’s Society, http://www.northumbrianpipers.org.uk/index.php?page=History (23/10/17). 23 Edward Bunting, A General Collection of Ancient Irish Music (London: Preston & Son, 1796). 81 they ranked and the exact remunerations they received have all been recorded.24

Whilst a large-scale revival of Folk music had already occurred in England, with institutions to co-ordinate and promote it already in place before the outbreak of the First World War, the same could not be said of Ireland until after the Second, although concerns were expressed that the traditional instruments were falling out of fashion (especially the harp, long a national symbol of Ireland): activity on a local level, however, was to be Irish music’s saviour. Despite a great deal of continuing adversity and social upheaval, such as the toll taken on the population by the near constant fighting (with the Easter Rising, war for independence and the Irish civil war sandwiched between the two World Wars), and the further population drain of a high rate of emigration, enthusiasts still met and played Irish music in semi-isolated pockets of activity around the country, and some chose to formalize and name their groups, creating local clubs and schools. It was from individual organizations such as these that the next step in creating a national movement arose, as recorded two years later by the Clogher Historical Society:

It fell to the lot of one such humble academy to formulate a plan, which it is hoped, will reverse the decadent trend of Irish Traditional Music. The Dublin Pipers Club, with membership representative of the four provinces, and including fiddlers, flautists and melodeon players as well as Uileann-pipers, decided that, unless the Folk- was placed on some definite national plane, the chances of an ultimate revival were remote.’25

Representatives from this Dublin club met with a similar cadre from County Westmeath in early 1951, with the intention of establishing not only a national organization for the promotion of the music (initially referred to as Cumann Ceoltóirí na hÊireann), but also a festival, () to serve as a platform for it. This festival, ‘the first meeting of the in Ireland since 1792’, was held in conjunction with an existing event run by Feis na h-Iar-Midhe (a branch of the Gaelic League, a group supporting and promoting the ) in Mullingar, Westmeath over the weekend.26 A key feature was the musical competition, wherein players could vie for awards on their specific instruments—that the winners hailed from as far afield as Donegal, Dublin, Monaghan and Clare was held to be a mark of the success of this first venture.27 Within a few years of that first festival, the movement had grown to the point that the annual Fleadh could now be referred to as the

24 W. H. Grattan Flood, History of Irish Music (Dublin: Browne & Nolan, 1905). 25 O. Muireadhaigh, ‘Traditional Music’, Clogher Record, 1/1 (1953), 27-31 (30). 26 Idem. 27 Idem. 82 Fleadh Cheoil na hEireann: the All-Ireland Music Festival.

Buoyed by this initial success, the first committee was in October of that year, to consolidate the formation of the new entity, which by the following year went under the banner of ‘Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Êireann’ (trans: Gathering of the Musicians of Ireland), with the Bishop of Meath as the first president. A complex constitution was rejected as restrictive and unwieldy for so young an organization, but a list of five stated aims was produced for guidance:

1. To promote Irish Traditional Music in all its forms. 2. To restore the playing of the Harp and in the national life of Ireland 3. To create a closer bond between all lovers of traditional music 4. To co-operate with all bodies working for the restoration of Irish culture 5. The establishment of branches throughout the country to achieve the foregoing objects.28

By the 1980s, these aims, formalized in the constitution of CCE, had been expanded to include three more objectives; To promote Irish Traditional Dancing; To foster and promote Traditional singing in English and Irish, and to foster and promote the Irish language at all times. In addition, the establishment of branches is stated as an international goal.29

CCÉ functions in a pyramid-like hierarchical structure whereby individual local branches, each responsible for their own activities, are grouped under regional or county administration, with each branch represented at the county board.30 Each county will organize its own annual fleadh (although it will be run by one of the branches), and has the power to suspend branch level activities if they are deemed to be working against the greater interests of CCÉ. The county board elects representatives to the Provincial council, the territories consisting originally of the four provinces of Ireland, but more were deemed necessary to cover the interests of CCÉ branches serving the diasporic Irish communities abroad. In the UK (divided into London, Midland, Northern and Scottish regions), the presence of numerous CCÉ branches means that competitive Irish folk music and dance is common to most major cities: London, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Nottingham and Newcastle all have

28 Muireadhaigh, 1953, 30. 29 CCÉ, ‘Goals’, Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Êireann, http://comhaltas.ie/about/goals/, 2000-2017 (23/10/17). 30 Edward O. Henry, ‘Institutions for the Promotion of Indigenous Music: The Case for Ireland's Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann’. Ethnomusicology 33/1 (1989), 67–95, (73). 83 active CCÉ branches. There is also a strong presence in North America (the USA has five regions, two) and finally another catch-all province was established entitled ‘Rest of World’ (currently representing branches in Argentina, Australia, Finland, France, Italy Japan and Luxembourg). The provincial councils answer to the Ardchomhairle, or Central Executive Council, the governing body of CCE, which in addition to directing the movement as a whole, organizes the All Ireland Fleadh.

Competition entrance and progression follows this pyramid structure; participants have to win through regional and provincial heats to compete at the All Ireland Level. A county competitor must have been resident in that county for at least six months prior to the competition, to prevent entries in multiple counties.31 In addition, there are four age groups— under twelve, twelve to fifteen, fifteen to eighteen and Senior (over eighteen)—with the level of technical ability and range of repertoire the competitors are required to demonstrate increasing in line with the age. Prizes are awarded for first, second and third place, and announced in reverse order by the judging panel.32 The competition itself is a highly formalized, with strict silence imposed during the performances, regardless of level. The setting could be a classroom or similar at county level, or the large hall used for the all Ireland, but the rules and the judging criteria remain the same. 33

2.2 Mary Wakefield and the Competition Festival

There are a number of parallels between the work of Mary Wakefield and Mary Neal, both in social background, political outlook and the will to benefit the public. Augusta Mary Wakefield was born in Kendal in 1853, daughter of wealthy dynasty of Quaker bankers; Mary (as she was known) was considered unique amongst her family for her gifts in music.34 She showed enough promise as a vocalist that her father allowed her to study music both at home and in London, a task in which she immersed herself with dedication, going as far as to have a Steinway grand piano winched through the window of the tower-top room she was given as

31 CCE, ‘Fleadh Entry Form 2011’, Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Êireann, http://comhaltas.ie/images/press_room/FleadhEntry2011_1.pdf (retrieved 09/09/2012, link defunct when checked 23/10/17). 32 Cathy Larson Sky, ‘A Lot of Notes but Little Music: Competition and the Changing Character of Performance’. New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, 1/1 (1997), 156–167. 33 I have witnessed two Comhaltas competitions, one in county Galway, which must have been at branch level (based on the fairly low attendance), held in the basement of a hotel, and a second at regional level in Birmingham’s Irish centre, both in the late 1990s, and both by chance for penny whistle. My abiding impression was of just how passive and rigid the performers were, appearing bored by the proceedings, although the technical standard of playing was high. 34 Rosa Newmarch, Mary Wakefield: A Memoire (Kendall: Atkinson and Pollit, 1912). 84 her studio at the family mansion, Sedgewick.35 Mary began singing in public at the age of twenty, and by the late 1870s had completed several concert tours of England, and had performed and studied in Italy. Her level of success raised the dilemma of whether a lady who had no need to perform for money was justified in charging for her services, or whether by singing for free she was depriving a less privileged performer of an income. This question of ‘entering the arena with those who are fighting for their livelihoods’ must have caused some consternation for her parents, because after the ‘crowning recognition of her artistic powers’ that was her appearance at the Gloucester festival of 1880, her father requested that she did not accept other bookings of similar stature in Leeds, Norwich and Chester—‘certain aspects of the musical and theatrical life… did not commend themselves to him as suitable for one of his children.36 Despite this parental restraint ‘limiting her appearances to non-professional engagements’, she remained active in the musical community, especially of her native Westmoreland. She wrote a number of articles for the music press, and later developed some of these article into a lecture series, which she was able to illustrate with musical examples herself.37

In contrast to her seeming subservience to paternal authority, Wakefield was an early supporter of the suffragettes, being ‘in all things on the side of progress’, and inspired by her Quaker heritage, noting that ‘from early days, the Friends have been supporters of the great ‘woman question’, as shown originally, and today, by their female preachers, and also in the part they have played wherever a woman’s work required a helping hand’.38 She was not, however, drawn into ‘the eccentric and injurious and procedures of some of her fellow workers in the cause’: a line similarly drawn by Mary Neal.39 Wakefield, like Neal, was also skilled in using her social networks to leverage support for her chosen cause: she had made many influential acquaintances amongst ‘those leaders of society who stood for music and philanthropy’ during her time in London, including Dr. Arthur Somervell and Sir Hubert Parry. Perhaps the biggest influence on her personal politics was her close friendship with the philosopher, art critic and poet John Ruskin, who she wrote about in her diaries with the adulation of a disciple.40 Rosa Newmarch, Wakefield’s long term friend and posthumous biographer, dedicates an entire chapter to their friendship, but is hamstrung by the Ruskin estate’s refusal to release his correspondence for publication, and can give very little of the

35 Newmarch 1912, 28. 36 Newmarch, 1912, 32 & 41. 37 Ibid, 31 & 49. 38 Ibid, 111-112. 39 Idem. 40 Ibid, 41-43. 85 real nature of their discussions, relying instead on descriptions of his household and grounds.41 Newmarch also believed Wakefield’s agenda in founding the movement was ‘socialistic in the best sense of the word, having set out to bring the greatest music within reach of the greatest number’: whilst not as hands on as Neal’s pioneering social work, the aim to benefit society is clear.42

Another with a great concern over the state of her national music in the late 19th century, Wakefield felt the dearth of a musical life in England was due to the public’s lack of exposure to, and more importantly participation in, quality works of . Her solution was to implement competitive music festivals, but not the large national types undertaken by professional choirs: these groups did not need their taste cultivating. Rather, she proposed that the real need was to increase the scope and raise the standard of amateur music making, and the foundation of this was high quality teaching. To this aim she stated that ‘we should place Music Competitions as providing some of the most easy and feasible means of instruction’.43 These events were to be staged at a local, village level, to instigate a musical renewal from what we would now call a grass roots level. In an article she published in Murrays Magazine, one of a series called The Foundation Stones of English Music, she opined that:

We should like to see Village Competitions as plentiful as local agricultural shows, and then we are certain that our part-music, in private and public, would stand a good chance of rivaling the Elizabethan era…. among the ancients, trials of skill in music had been seen as a method of teaching, as long as we have any record of the art.44

As the other competitive traditions discussed above had done, Wakefield also harked back to antiquity in her efforts to legitimize the position of competitive music within the tradition of music making in Britain, believing the ancient Welsh Eisteddfodau to be the root of such events in England (although she believed the events of that name in her own time were inherently flawed). In the same article she stresses that music performed in ensemble is best suited to the purpose, as ‘much better work can be done by numbers than by individual performance’, with the ability to help one another being foremost in the benefits of ‘concerted music’. Believing that, when choosing from the entire cannon of great works, for small towns and villages the vocal repertoire was the most practicable, she stressed the ‘exceeding superiority for this purpose of choral music over instrumental’, and strongly encouraged those wishing to begin their own festival to follow this example. The competition festival

41 Newmarch, 1912, 55-65. 42 Newmarch, 1912, 90. 43 Augusta Mary Wakefield ‘Foundation Stones of English Music’, Murray's Magazine, 4/22 (1888:Oct.), 489. 44 Idem. 86 movement, which began on the courts of her father’s mansion with just three double vocal quartets competing in 1885, grew rapidly, to the extent that by 1904 it was necessary to form an Association of Competition Festivals, with Wakefield and Dr. W McNaught as the co-secretaries. By this time, the three features that, combined, both set a Wakefield competitive music festival apart of its predecessors and contributed to the rapid growth of competitions in this new style, were as follows:

1: Competition as a stimulus to the study and practice of music. 2: The stern elimination of money prizes. 3: The study of music for combined singing, apart from competition.45

The first issue was central to Wakefield’s ethos. She believed that the main hurdle in reviving a musical life in Britain was that the public had no inherent wish to study music for an indefinite period with no particular goal other than ‘the love of the divine art of music’. Competition not only provided the incentive to begin, and the will to continue, but allowed the study to begin with ‘a definite end in view, a definite time in which certain works must be accomplished’, and the event itself would provide ‘valuable criticism, which, for a second year, tells us how to advance in work, to say nothing of a possible prize, and the possible great joy of triumphing over the next own or village’.46

The second key Wakefield feature—the embargo on cash prizes—was emphatic, as she strongly believed monetary incentives to undermine the integrity of the event:

Competition as an inducement to hard work is one thing; but competition with a view to raking in valuable money prizes becomes too often a vicious rivalry. Mary Wakefield saw in how many instances it had sapped the true artistic value of the . From the commencement she set her face resolutely against ‘pot hunting’ in Westmoreland, establishing instead a system of grants, which go to all choirs equally to assist them with their expenses.47

The latter feature—the combined performance — was an innovation, placing all competing groups on a level playing field in financial terms, and giving them a common goal to work towards, whilst still leaving the draw of the winning status intact. The prizes that were awarded, such as challenge , banners of song and the bay wreath, were deliberately redolent of ancient Greek ceremony, as the ability to take an impressive and desirable physical trophy home could only add to the incentive. All of the competitors working toward the common goal of performing some great work as a single massed choir was considered the

45 Newmarch, 1912, 83. 46 Newmarch, 1912, 82-84. 47 Idem. 87 real breakthrough of Wakefield’s movement: indeed, it was this feature which had been singled out for particular praise by the Cambridgeshire Committee. The piece that would be performed (Wakefield mentions Bach cantatas and a selection from Brahm’s requiem as examples) was not to be one that featured in the competitive elements of the festival, and was designed to undo the potential ‘narrowing tendencies of competition’ by inducing the various groups to place co-operation before competition. This ‘moral effect’ provided the ‘greatest element of solidarity of the movement’. To Wakefield, it was the foundation stone of her entire work:

It is the development of this non-competitive movement side-by-side with the competition in which I am so greatly interested. I do not believe the thing can survive without it, at all events in country districts, and I am sure at least three times the advance in music is made by its means…48

2.2.1 Folk Song Competition in England

Wakefield was also closely involved with the folk-song movement, having long used a local Westmoreland song ‘Sally Gray’ as her encore when performing in her home county, often by audience request.49 She was a member of the Folk-Song Society, and also published an article on May Carols with contributions from collector Lucy Broadwood. Wakefield’s accompanist George Rathbone believed that ‘the Folk-song movement received a great impulse from her support’.50 As Francmanis has noted, the most obvious expression of this support was in instigating the Folk-Song Competition at her festivals.51 The first Folk song competition in England was held in 1902, at the Westmorland Music Festival in Kendal, the much-expanded descendant of Mary Wakefield’s original festival.52 Interestingly, the judging criteria were not in skewed favour of the best performer, but rather to the most rare repertoire, as the prize would go to:

The best unpublished Country Dialect Song, which has been handed down traditionally and orally in any one of the Six Northern Counties. Although the song had to be sung by the Competitor, the prize would be awarded not so much for the best singing of the song, as for 'the most interesting and curious of the old-fashioned songs now so seldom heard.53

48 Newmarch, 1912, 83. 49 Ibid, 39. 50 Ibid, 91, (quoting George Rathbone). 51 Francmanis, 1997, 207. 52 Francmanis, 1997, Chapter 6. 53 Francmanis, 1997, 207, (quoting Frank Kidson). 88

In addition, songs which were of a traceably popular origin, in that they had been published, would be disqualified, although texts that had been issued as broadsides would be allowed, so long as the melody was not in print. Singers were obliged to give a full written account of how they came by their songs, and the words were submitted in advance, to allow the research to be carried out that would establish their credentials as unpublished gems of the oral tradition.54

Whilst the chief adjudicator in this instance was officially Dr. J C Bridge, it was folk song collector and antiquarian Frank Kidson of Leeds (vocal opponent of Sharp’s drive for folk song in schools) who provided the real expertise in assessing the entries, as his extensive knowledge of both the oral repertoire and the printed broadsides had gained him a reputation as ‘a walking encyclopaedia on these things’.55 In his 1997 Ph.D thesis, John Francmanis provides a very detailed account of the songs and singers that appeared at that first festival, and the subsequent two years that followed the success of the first experiment. In 1904, the committee voted to keep the competition due to its antiquarian value at Wakefield’s request, but made the surprising concession to allow cash prizes to be offered: the only time Wakefield is recorded as having done so.56 This was done in the hope of drawing competitors from further afield, as six counties were eligible to enter.57 Perhaps the fact that this was a competition for solo singers, with the express agenda of collecting the songs they sang rather than marking them on performance quality, made it far enough from her ideals as to be of no matter. As a side note, the same committee also voted Cecil Sharp as the new judge of the category. Over time, other festivals added the folk song to the available categories of competition, including the Mid-Somerset festival, with their first Folk-song category held at Frome in 1904. It was run along the lines of the Kendal festival, with the same rules and initially the same judge, Kidson. The movement was to prove a real boon to Folk song collectors, as rather than going out hunting for appropriate singers in the countryside, a sizeable group of singers would be gathered in one place with songs at the ready. At another event in Brigg, Lancashire, during 1905, Kidson and encountered Joseph Taylor, who Grainger later recorded on an early phonograph along with some other local singers, providing a valuable record of a regional style.58

54 Francmanis, 1997, 208. 55 Francmanis, 1997, 208. 56 Ibid, Chapter 7, (see also Newmarch, 1912, 84). 57 Idem. 58 Idem. 89 2.2.2 Competition and Pedagogy

Competition within folk music of Britain and Ireland, always situated within a wider context of regional and national identity, was already ongoing as the first folk revival in England gathered momentum at the start of the C20th. The longevity of these systems is testament to how effective they are as a means of perpetuating a tradition, but they are not without potential drawbacks. Mary Wakefield’s contribution was to devise a method that limited the potentially negative aspects of competitive music making, whilst still re-enforcing the potential gains. Although the various competition scenes provide an incentive for players to improve their abilities by providing both monetary rewards and prestige, the draw of these very incentives can be both a deeply divisive and intensely partisan experience: only one player or group can win each given prize, and magnanimity is not the guaranteed response of those who are less successful, or of their supporters. In this regard, the ‘moral effect’ of which Wakefield spoke was to redress the balance between the community from which the music sprang and the musicians who performed it, privileging the wider culture and its associated social gain over the individual.

Another issue, which Wakefield sought to address, was ‘the narrowing effect’ of intense competition, which can manifest in several forms. The larger CCÉ events illustrate these potential issues well, as the sheer scale of the All Ireland Competition, coupled with the highest of stakes, magnifies the impact. The first pitfall that arises from such a large-scale competition is that the categories have to reflect the tradition with a similarly broad brushstroke of ‘all Ireland’.59 It is impossible to include, for example, repertoires or styles that are specific to a single region within Ireland, as this would disadvantage those from other locales. Consequently, a tune type such as ‘highlands’ of Donegal, which, reflecting the area’s strong links with Western Scotland, are very similar in structure and style to the Strathspeys of that region, are not included: the distinctive of County Kerry are similarly absent. Competitions of this magnitude can also reach back and adversely impact the tradition they represent and promote, even down to deciding which instruments are admissible; for many years, the was rejected as an Americanised mainstream affectation, whereas the , adapted from a Greek instrument in the latter half of the 20th century by a small handful of players (most notably Alec Finn of the band De Danaan), ‘snuck in by the back

59 Sky, 1997. 90 door’ to become the epitome of Irish chordal accompaniment.60 Competition on such a scale can also alter the very repertoire of the tradition. An All Ireland win is prestigious to say the least, and can act as a gateway to a lifetime professional career as a traditional musician. With the stakes so high, next year’s potential contenders analyze a winner’s style in great detail, hoping to gain an edge in the following year’s competition: each successive year becomes a distillation of the last, as unsuccessful stylings are dropped in favour of winning strategies.

Despite Wakefield’s assertion to the contrary, music competitions are not a style of tuition in their own right; she still required a musician to teach and lead her participants before they were able to compete, just as her collaborative choral works required direction from a conductor. It is not that the individual competitors within a competition do not receive tuition—many CCÉ branches provide instrumental and dance tuition, for example—but rather that the competition sits at one remove from the direct contact of teaching, providing a meta- level educational ethos which frames the competing community as a whole. The true impact of the competition scene is that it promotes a set of normative enculturated values—be they stylistic, behavioural or aspirational—adherence to which is rewarded with money and/or visible status, providing a compelling incentive to conform. Over the course of several generations, this set of values can become refined to the point where a tradition is noticeably altered. The effect is amplified both by the scale of the competition and the magnitude of the reward, with CCÉ providing the most extreme example within the British Isles, due to the sheer reach of the organisation. Wakefield’s masterstroke was to both recognize and attempt to regulate this inherent umbrella of sub-cultural expectations that grow up around a competition circuit, placing a larger encompassing ethos of collaboration around it. By doing so, she sought to guarantee that the music provided a positive social benefit to all competitors, regardless of their ability.

2.3 Wireless Technology and the Birth of British Broadcasting

The second new addition to the musical lives of British school that the Cambridgeshire committee had given their cautious recommendation to was the new wireless network which could broadcast music to schools nationwide. The particular way in which broadcast technology had evolved in Britain had led to the development of a unique, singular, nationally

60 Fintan Valleley, ‘Authenticity to Classicisation: The Course of Revival in Irish Traditional Music’. The Irish Review, 33 (2005), 51–69. 91 licensed broadcasting body quite unlike those of neighbouring European countries or North America. This path of development is worth detailing, as it was only through the particular convoluted and intertwined pathways of technological development, legal wrangling and the work of visionary individuals that the BBC was able to come into existence, and with it a monopoly on the radio programming that was developed for schools.

Wireless telegraphy was already firmly established in British public consciousness by the time of the Cambridgeshire report. The young Italian Guglielmo Marconi had applied for his first patents in London in 1897; having received little support from his native government, he shrewdly assumed that the British Empire would show an interest in the potential naval applications of his new technology.61 In this he was proved correct, winning a major Admiralty contract in July 1900 for the fledgling Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Co. Ltd.62 Marconi, whose considerable skill in engineering was matched by an impressive ability to promote and publicise his technological breakthroughs, made a series of major advances in the first two decades of the 20th century. Land based ‘Marconi Stations’ established cross- channel communications in 1899, and a consistently reliable transatlantic wireless telegraph connection in 1907.63 Both commercial and military ship-borne wireless systems were relatively common by the time that the stricken RMS Titanic famously broadcast her distress signals in 1912. From 1914 to 1918, the arms race engendered by the Great War provided a major impetus for wireless development, to the point that airborne systems allowed communication between the crews of another new development: combat aircraft.64

The above developments had all been focussed toward refining direct communication between individual wireless operators, or so-called ‘point-to-point’ wireless. ‘Broadcasting’, or the simultaneous wireless reception by anybody possessed of the necessary equipment to ‘tune in’, was initially seen as a drawback of the technology. The vision to utilise this previously undesirable trait as a means of mass communication was clearer in the USA. Without the direct impact of war on home soil to inhibit their creativity, non-military applications for the technology were open for discussion and development even during the conflict. David Sarnoff, an employee of Marconi’s American division, expressed the view in 1916 that a ‘Radio Music Box’ could stand alongside the piano or phonograph in the family

61 W. J. Baker, A History of the Marconi Company (London: Methuen, 1970), 28-31. 62 Ibid, 51. 63 Baker, 1970, 44 & 123-125. 64 Ibid, 170-171. 92 home, and that a market for the sales of such wireless receivers could be very lucrative.65 The potential for the provision of a public entertainment service in Britain was first explored in 1920. With his characteristic flair for publicity, Marconi signalled his intention to pursue the new medium by broadcasting a live performance by the world-renowned soprano Dame Nelly Melba.66 The stunt, sponsored by the Daily Mail and broadcast from their headquarters, was heard throughout Europe, demonstrating the potential power and appeal of the public broadcast. Yet despite this auspicious beginning, it would be almost two years before a regular broadcast service could be established in Britain; the problem was licensing.

Wireless telephony was seen as an extension of the regular telephone service and, as with telegraphy, this came under the purview of the Post Office. Marconi’s broadcasts were halted; his general licence to conduct experiments in radio-telephony did not extend to this broadcast activity, which was deemed to interfere with vital naval and aviation communication.67 The popularity of the new medium was growing rapidly however, and concerted lobbying by societies of amateur wireless enthusiasts was instrumental in lifting the veto in December 1921. Marconi was able to resume broadcasting in January of the following year,68 and within months competing stations run by the Western Electric Company sprang up in London and Birmingham, and Metropolitan Vickers began a similar operation in Manchester.69 The Post Office continued to arrange licensing on an individual basis, but was reluctant to issue permanent permission.

It was becoming apparent that Britain simply could not support an American style wireless free-for-all, where commercial stations vied for the public’s attention by attracting lucrative advertising sponsorships and building ever more powerful transmitters. As demand for the new service grew, both broadcasters and manufacturers of domestic wireless receivers began to make demands for a share of the available broadcast frequencies. On the international stage, Britain was encountering similar issues with neighbouring Europe; too close to be able to use the full frequency range without conflicting with continental signals. Whereas America was large enough to be able to support multiple commercially competing stations, Britain’s size and location meant a more uniform and controlled approach was needed. Unable to deal

65 Andrew Crisell, An Introductory History of British Broadcasting (London: Routledge, 2002), 17. 66 Asa Briggs, History of Broadcasting in the : Volume I: Birth of Broadcasting (Oxford: OUP, 1995), 43. 67 Briggs, 1995, vol. 1, 45-46. 68 Baker, 1970, 188-189. 69 Crisell, 2002, 18. 93 with the deluge of licensing requests, the Postmaster-General called for a consortium of the major manufacturers to apply for a collective licence for a single, national broadcasting body.

2.3.1 The BBC and Music Education

On the 15th of December 1922, the British Broadcasting Company was formed; funding was derived from royalties from the sale of wireless sets and a share of the licence fee paid by listeners.70 This arrangement would be extensively renegotiated in the next few years, with consultation from first the Sykes Committee in 1923 and then the Crawford Committee in 1925, ultimately resulting in a Government buyout of the various company’s shares, and formation by charter of the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1927.71 The new corporation, although bound by certain governmental restraints despite its ostensible public ownership, was to be largely editorially and institutionally autonomous; crucially, this meant it was able to determine its own programme content. This was key to the vision of the Corporation’s Director-General, John Reith.

Reith and his fellow controllers had ‘a conscious social purpose’, and regarded ‘the diffusion of knowledge’ as having the same importance as the provision of quality ‘superior entertainment’.72 As Asa Briggs notes in the first book of his exhaustive five-volume history of the BBC, ‘Wireless was to them an instrument of public good, not a means or of handling people or of “pandering to their wants” ’.73 This was in direct contrast to Marconi and his competitors’ deliberately populist fare of sporting coverage and variety concerts.74 By operating as a monopoly, informative and improving broadcasts could be created without the threat of losing audience share to external commercial competition. The licence fee enabled the BBC to make programmes it deemed to be useful regardless of internal commercial pressures; potential audience size did not need to correlate with production expense, allowing for quality programming for minority interest groups.75 This autonomy was not entirely without its drawbacks, however; the Corporation, not regarding their listenership as a market,

70 Briggs, 1995 vol.1, 2. 71 Briggs, 1995 vol.1, 167-170, 326-328. 72 Briggs, 1995 vol.1, 6. 73 Ibid, 6-7. 74 Baker, 1970, 192. 75 Crisell, 2002, 18-20. 94 had little initial interest in developing a market research strategy, and could sometimes find itself out of step with public perceptions as a result.76

This high-minded yet conservative attitude was clear in the way the corporation dealt with its musical output. The Music department dealt solely with classical repertoire and performance as part of a doctrine of providing ‘the best’, to the extent that the BBC retained its very own Symphony Orchestra from 1930.77 Popular music (whether music hall comic ditties or the new American jazz) was treated as part of entertainment broadcasting on ‘The Light Programme’. Broadcasts were often in the variety style of the day, including comic sketches, and monologues amongst the songs. This format was followed so closely that in 1925 some broadcasts even included a chorus line of dancing girls despite their being totally invisible to the listening audience: they were made audible by dancing on creaky boards.78 Documenting and disseminating folk music, folklore, custom and dialect was seen as a key role of the Corporation’s new sound archive division in 1931; according to its first director, Marie Slocombe, this brief ‘received every encouragement from the BBC management’ from the outset.79 Regardless of the genre, music, being an aural medium, was ideally suited to radio broadcast; forming a considerable portion of the BBC’s total arts output, the Corporation was accused of privileging music over and above other artforms.80

In keeping with the aims of an organisation with such a strong educational ethos, the nation’s youth were held as an important part of the listening public. Reith saw the line between education and entertainment as being simply that of intent; the BBC’s output should have an educative influence overall, but only those programmes designed primarily for this purpose should be labelled as such.81 Never the less, the Corporation’s intervention in the Nation’s schooling was not undertaken lightly, and the commissioning process displayed diligent concern that any broadcasts for school children should be both effective and appropriate. Reith commissioned the creation of the Central Education Advisory Committee in order to provide specific guidance on the production of dedicated programming for schools, and experimental test broadcasts were made to a single school in Glasgow in Feb 1924 in order to

76 Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Volume. 2: The Golden Age of Wireless (Oxford: OUP, 1995), 10. 77 Crisell, 2002, 36. 78 Crisell, 2002, 39. 79 Marie Slocombe, ‘The BBC folk music collection’, Folk Song and Folk Music Archivist, Indiana State University, 7/1 (1964), 3-13, (3). 80 Gordon Cox, 'School music broadcasts and the BBC 1924-47', History of Education, 25/4 (1996), 363-71, (363). 81 Briggs, 1995 vol.2, 185. 95 identify any technical flaws in the process.82 Only after this process did schools radio move to full national broadcast, beginning from in April 1924 from London’s 2LO station: the very station which had been home to Marconi’s pioneering work.83 Reith’s influence was such that the BBC was able to continue to call on the expertise of senior figures in the field of education: advice was obtained from such luminaries as H. A. L. Fisher, (who later served on the BBC’s board of governors from 1935 to ’39), and Sir Henry Hadow, (who chaired the BBC committee which produced an influential report on broadcast education opportunities in 1928).84

The first of this new series of broadcasts tailored to classroom listening was on the subject of music, presented by their instigator, Sir Henry Walford Davies .85 With hindsight the BBC’s choice of Walford Davis seems almost pre-ordained; by the time of his death in 1941, the Musical Times characterised him as an indispensible national treasure.86 He was the people’s ‘musical lecturer-in-chief’87, his voice synonymous with British appreciation of music; that he was included in a set of ‘Radio Celebrity’ cigarette cards (a collectable series issued with Will’s Cigarettes), and could be recognisably caricatured by both a music hall comedian such as George Robey88 and a satirical magazine such as Punch89, illustrates how far he had permeated the public consciousness. Presenting programmes with such titles as Everyman’s Music, Melodies of Christendom and Music for the Ordinary Listener, his efforts were always such that ‘he humanized (sic) great music’.90 As Ralph Vaughan Williams commented,

…Walford Davies had no doubts about his mission, which was to put the highest musical standards before " Tom, Dick and Harry," as he loved to call his " ordinary listener”.91

By appointing the same voice to present both the adult and child focussed music education programming, the BBC demonstrated how highly they valued the schools audience. A respected composer, organist and musical director, Walford Davis had studied under both Charles Villiers Stanford and Hubert Parry, and was the first musical director for the RAF.

82 David Crook, ‘School Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: An Exploratory History’, Journal of Educational Administration and History, 39/3 (2007), 217-226. 83 Crisell, 2002, 20. 84 Briggs, 1995 vol.2, 186. 85 Cox, 1996. 86 Anon, ‘Henry Walford Davies’, The Musical Times, 82/1178 (April 1941), 159-160. 87 Ibid. 88 Alec Robertson, ‘Walford Davies and the Ordinary Listener’, The Musical Times, 82/1178 (April 1941), 129. 89 Briggs, 1995, vol.2, 464. 90 Robertson, 1941. 91 Ralph Vaughan-Williams, ‘Sir Henry Walford Davis Obituary’, The Spectator, (March 13th 1941), 10. 96 His style of broadcasting, whilst making for ‘good radio’ in a general sense, was not initially considered to be ideally suited to an audience of children. This was due in part to the unfamiliar vocabulary of the professional musician, in part to the rapidity of his delivery, and also to his penchant for complex metaphor, which was believed to confuse the listening children.92 An observer within a school in was assigned to give on how his programmes were being received in the classroom, and this ‘watchdog’ was instrumental in assisting him in modifying his broadcasts to better address his younger audience.93 A Walford Davis programme was to provide the test-bed for what would become another major part of the Corporation’s schools’ radio strategy: the first printed pamphlet sent out to schools to accompany a broadcast series was his Melody Book No. 1 in 1926. This addition proved to be a successful format; in the following year alone, 233,000 booklets were issued to schools across the country to accompany school programming across all subject areas.94

Walford Davies believed that melodic invention and staff notation were the twin, interdependent pillars of a rounded musical education. By learning to write down a tune that they heard or invented, or by viewing corresponding notation as they listened and responded to music, the children would be unavoidably acquiring musical literacy. As a result, Davis’ school music broadcast, which was entitled Elementary Music (later divided into junior and senior versions), contained echo games for ear training, and listening performances; the main focus, however, was placed on ‘tune building’.95 The listening children were asked either to write an answering phrase to one that was played to them, or to compose a tune to a text that was provided, notate them and send them in to the BBC; a selected few of these submissions would appear in future programmes and their accompanying pamphlets.

The reception for the tune making was mixed: vaunted success in Welsh schools was not matched in classroom observations in Yorkshire.96 Feedback for the children’s efforts at composition was still largely dependent on the competency of any musically trained staff at their respective school, as the BBC were unable to respond to each individual child’s composition. Despite Davies’ passion and conviction, the broadcasts were not especially well received within the BBC, with critics asserting that too much time was spent on composition to the exclusion of those without that aptitude. Davies resigned in 1934, succeeding Elgar as

92 Crook, 2007, 218. 93 Briggs, 1995 vol.2, 195. 94 Idem. 95 Cox, 1996. 96 Cox, 1996, 366. 97 Master of the King’s Music. He was asked back on air at the outset of war, but the innovative ‘tune building’ was not included, at the express request of the Corporation.

Music and Movement, which began broadcasting in 1934, was met with greater critical acclaim. Initially aimed at under 6s, the presenter Ann Driver (a Jacques-Dalcroze devotee) believed that singing alone was not a balanced music education, and that children should feel rhythm physically through action. Driver’s was a child-centred approach, with imaginative use of actions to make sounds, and children being asked to act out suggested scenarios to music. Cox quotes a BBC Sub Committee report from 1936:

The programme promoted a 'happy and joyful atmosphere', and became 'real foundation work for maypole and folk dancing taken later'. The physical benefits were apparent: 'children walk quite freely with no stiffness'. 97

2.4 Singing Together: Folk Song for Schools

By the outbreak of war in 1939, 10,000 schools were receiving BBC educational content nationwide, and there were 39 dedicated weekly programmes for schools to tune in to.98 The need for programming for potential evacuees had been foreseen by the Schools Council, with the aim ‘to interest and amuse them and, in particular, to help them to find their bearings in their new surroundings’.99 The BBC Schools Service was also scheduled to be evacuated to a secret location, revealed only as ‘Somewhere in England’, but in the event the declaration of war seemed to take them by surprise; for the first few weeks, the pre-delivered scripts had to be partially performed by the actors of a local repertory company before the regular staff could be transferred to the new base of operations.100 Beginning from the 5th of September 1939, there were two hour-long broadcast sessions for schools each day, attempting to provide content equivalent to that of the pre-war schools service, albeit within the bounds of wartime restrictions on budget, content and personnel: modern language lessons were abandoned, and some history programming renamed. The decision was taken not to pander directly to the children’s interest in the war, both to avoid censorship and to maintain a degree of objectivity; the issues could be referenced obliquely via historical parallels. Despite the initial struggle, the wireless was to solidify and expand its role within the nation’s classrooms

97 Cox, 1996, 365 quoting: Music and Movement, music programme sub committee report, January 1936. 98 Crisell, 2002, 41. 99 Anon, BBC Yearbook 1940 (London, Jarrold & Sons, 1940), 68. 100 Idem. 98 throughout the conflict, albeit aided in part by the cessation of all television broadcasting services during wartime.101 By November 1942 over 11,000 schools were tuning in to the BBC: more than half of all the schools in the country.102

Just as with the other subject areas, the music broadcasts continued with as much normality as could be mustered; Anne Driver’s Music and Movement, and a reinstated Sir Walford Davis’ Music Making were both well received during the opening months of the war.103 The one major change necessitated by the extreme circumstances of the conflict was that the booklets were no longer to be used, as Mary Somerville (Director of Schools Broadcasting) related in the BBC yearbook of 1940.

In peace-time most of the series are accompanied by pamphlets for children, but as it was impossible to guarantee that, even if pamphlets already printed were offered to the schools, the Local Education Authorities would be able in all cases to distribute them, it was decided if possible to make the broadcasts self-sufficient.104

From the perspective of folk music education, the most important of the schools broadcast came about almost by accident. ‘Singing Together’ was borne of wartime necessity at the outset of the autumn term in 1939. The show was the brainchild of Herbert Wiseman, its first presenter. As he recalled in 1962:

The date was September 1939, the BBC had all its preparations made for the autumn term's broadcasts - pamphlets were printed for all subjects, including the music lessons… Then came the war, and mass evacuation of children from their homes and schools. They were scattered about the country in small detached groups. The issue of pamphlets was stopped; no systematic class instruction was possible, education had to become an affair of hasty improvisation to meet the new enforced conditions. Then somebody had a brainwave. The children were scattered but even when only two or three were gathered together they could still sing. What about broadcasting a few songs and encouraging all, no matter where they were, to take part? A title for such a series? Oh, easy! Singing Together. And on the 25th of September, a few days after the war had begun, we started the series which has gone on till today.105

The episodes were broadcast weekly, at 11am on every Monday of the school term, with each show lasting for 18 minutes. ‘Billy Boy’, ‘Golden Slumbers’ and ‘Michael Finnegan’ were the songs included in the very first broadcast, and subsequent programmes followed a similar

101 Crook, 2007, 121. 102 Idem. 103 Anon, BBC Yearbook 1940, 69-70. 104 BBC Yearbook 1940, 70. 105 Cox, 1996 (quoting a transcription, Scottish Life and Letters, broadcast 31 December 1962. BBC Sound Archive LP28639). 99 pattern of three pieces: one chorus song, one song with a beautiful melody, and one comic or nonsense song.106 It should be remembered that this formula, and the individual songs selected, was chosen for ease of learning by ear, as there were no accompanying song sheets available. The repertoire had a strong emphasis on folk songs and shanties from the British Isles and beyond, as well as nursery rhymes and songs from the ‘great masters’.107 The show was broadcast live from Glasgow, with the songs accompanied by piano and some ‘lusty male voices’ to join in the choruses; adult male voices were specifically chosen as they sang in a different register to the children. By 1941 it was by far the most popular schools music broadcast, with 4100 schools tuning in, more than twice that of Music and Movement, its nearest competitor.108 Yet despite its popularity, we know little more about these early wartime broadcasts than is contained in the paragraphs above. In addition to the lack of any song sheets or classroom pamphlets, there are also no recordings of complete shows from the Wiseman era contained in the BBC archive. As is made clear by both Herbert Wiseman and Mary Somerville’s testimonies above, the publication of pamphlets to accompany broadcasts was halted during the war, but it is unclear at what point their production was resumed. Paper, like foodstuffs, fuel and many other commodities, was rationed due to shortages and import difficulties; newspapers, for example, were restricted to nearly half their previous page count during wartime.109

2.4.1 Methodology and Resources

Whilst recordings of the actual programme are both extremely scarce and difficult to access, there are a number of other resources available with which to assess the show’s content and potential impact. A brief list of these resources, mostly web based forums and archives, is given below, along with an assessment how useful they proved to be in the context of this research.

Mudcat: The Mudcat Café is an online, volunteer led forum for sharing information about folk, and traditional music and other related material. Originally a blues forum established in the mid 1990s, the primary focus has drifted towards folk music in the broadest,

106 Cox, 1996, 369. 107 Cox, 1996, 369, (quoting Wiseman). 108 Cox, 1996, 369. 109 Emma Golding, ‘Second world war and paper rationing’, Guardian News Media Archive, http://www.theguardian.com/gnmeducationcentre/paper-rationing-second-world-war-teaching-resource-gnm- archive, 02/09/2013 (23/10/17). 100 most inclusive and least specific sense: songs that the community of ‘mudcatters’ remember, share and enjoy, only some of which would be regarded as traditional by the standards of folk song scholars. As well as discussion threads, members can post lyric requests for half remembered songs, in the hope that the wider user group can supply the missing verses. Many of these lyrics are then included in the forum’s ‘Digital Tradition Folk Song Database’ which, at time of writing, contains over 9000 records. The forum has hosted a number of threads on the subject of BBC Singing Together, going back as far as 2001. Many of the individual posts are reminiscences about listening to the show as children, or lyric requests, but there are also some detailed discussions about specific songs or booklets. There has been a small group of Singing Together enthusiasts active on the site for a number of years, and efforts have been made in the past to digitize some of the booklets and their contents (see below). Aside from some touching anecdotes, the two main uses for Mudcat were in links to the Joe-Offer archive, and in providing some additional information from the producer of the BBC Archive On 4 documentary regarding the show’s earliest years.

Folkinfo.org, Joe-Offer: The online ‘folkinfo’ archive, unfortunately defunct since 2012, was previously a useful resource for anybody seeking a song that had featured on the show. Though the site is now inactive, the archived content is now hosted by a Mudcat Café administrator, and is often referred or linked to within group discussions on that forum. Whilst the archive was not created specifically to showcase this material, it contained songs transcribed from 46 of the BBC pamphlets ranging from 1951 to 1986, with half being drawn from the 1970s.110 The music, lyrics and an indication of the booklet of origin are present (albeit in transcribed rather than facsimile form) as are any additional notes that the transcriber saw fit to include, as well as Roud, Laws and Child numbers where appropriate. Any discussion about the song, which previously had been initiated on the associated forum, can also be accessed in archival form from the same record.

Of the 60 booklets assembled as the basis of this research and the archive’s 46, there are only 18 titles in common. Checking the archived transcriptions against the booklet of origin showed them to be highly accurate: in fact, the only error found was in the supplied Roud numbers of two of the records. Unfortunately, there are several reasons that make using this resource problematic, all of which are consequences of the intended purpose of the records,

110 A list of the total Singing Together content from folkinfo.org (hosted at http://www.Joe-Offer.com), was available at the time of writing on the Mudcat Café Forum, listed by booklet and with hyperlinks to the songs that had been transcribed. The thread was here: http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=154766 (12/01/2015), but the link was later found to be defunct (23/10/17). 101 rather than any inherent deficiencies. The primary function, from the forum user’s perspective, was to access specific pieces of repertoire, mostly with relation to folk and traditional music. Thus, the records are not necessarily the complete contents of the booklets, with songs not relating to the archive’s folk music interests notably omitted. Similarly, omission has led to some of the autumn term booklets seeming particularly sparsely represented. Some of the earlier examples have conflated Singing Together material with content relating to the Rhythm and Melody programme from the same booklet without marking the difference: useful for forum members looking for repertoire, but unusable as a source for this research. Only a single version of each song is transcribed, making comparison between multiple versions from different pamphlets impossible. Being standalone transcriptions, they are also shorn of the context of the booklet: illustrations, annotations, and extra harmony or rhythm parts are all missing from the forum’s versions. Ultimately, although initially appearing promising, none of these resources were reliable enough within the context of this research to be of use. The archived conversations did prove to be of benefit however, particularly when attempting to identify a source for some of the otherwise uncredited art songs.

Broadcastforschools.co.uk contains an excellent overview of the BBC’s work in schools since the outset, albeit often in rather general terms. Of particular value are the numerous detailed broadcast schedules, drawn from archived Radio Times listings, allowing comparisons of what else was being broadcast during any specific period. The website also contained the earliest image of a Singing Together pamphlet to be found anywhere online, a partial crop of the cover to the issue from Autumn 1948, coincidentally the same issue as earliest example traced for the collection upon which this study is based. Without that image, there would have been no evidence for booklets before 1950, and the hard copy of the 1948 example may not have been found.

Archive on 4: The BBC broadcast its own radio tribute to Singing Together as part of its ongoing Archive On 4 series in November 2014. Presented by Singing Together enthusiast (and erstwhile front man of Britpop band Pulp) Jarvis Cocker, compiling the material for the show had taken almost four years, not least due to the absence of relevant recordings from the BBC’s own archive.111 To make up the shortfall in material, an appeal for information, memories and privately held recordings was launched via the ‘PM’ show. Interviews with

111 ‘Singing Together’, Archive on 4, BBC Radio 4, 29/11/14, hereafter listed as ‘Archive on 4’, so as to avoid potential confusion with the many Singing Together booklets. 102 academics and researchers, current and former BBC employees, a retired school-teacher and current performers on the UK folk scene were all used to Much of the material on the history of school’s radio was recorded in interview with Gordon Cox, essentially repeating the material covered in his 1996 article (cited above). The interviews provided perspectives from a number of the show’s key personnel, including archived recordings of deceased presenters and clips from the three existing archived recordings of the show itself.

The BBC Booklets: The most reliable, accessible and numerous primary source for assessing how heavily the programme had featured folk and traditional song was the booklets which the BBC had published to support the radio broadcasts; amassing a large enough collection of these pamphlets to form a good sized sample to use as a basis for research was the task. The acquisition process was both lengthy and somewhat haphazard by nature: junk fairs, secondhand bookstores, charity shops and online auctions all proved to be useful sources over several years, albeit only for small numbers of booklets at any one time. Two donations from school archives—one rescued from a closed down Yorkshire primary school, the other from a private school in the Midlands—provided a welcome boost to the amount of available material. 112 Discounting numerous duplicates, a total of 60 individual booklets, were eventually assembled, ranging in date from 1948 to 1991. The appendix to this thesis lists the complete content of the booklets assessed, along with notes on how the contents were calssified for the purposes of this research.

2.5 Wartime 1940s: Singing Together For Comfort

Information on the content of the wartime shows is understandably sparse. As previously stated, there were no printed pamphlets from that period, and there are no extant audio recordings of Singing Together broadcasts before the late 1960s. Some footage of children singing appears in the background of a film about schools radio from 1943, a portion of the audio of which appeared in the 2014 Archive on 4 documentary: the song in question is ‘Green Grow The Rushes – O’, sung in Unison to a piano accompaniment.113 This single. Brief extract appears to be the only audible record of any sort from the wartime broadcasts of Singing Together, and tells us very little about the show that was not already known:

112 I am indebted both to Jenny Beastie and to Elmfield School’s music department. 113 Archive on 4. 103

Posting in the Mudcat Café online forum pages in June 2014, Ruth Evans (producer of the aforementioned Archive On 4 documentary for BBC radio) shared a list she had uncovered from the BBC archives of the songs prepared for use between April and June 1940 (reproduced below as submitted, with no spelling or grammar corrections, asterisks added, hereafter referred to as ‘The 1940 List’: see Table 2):114

'Marching Through Georgia', 'Come O'er the Stream, Charlie', 'Upidee’, 'My Bonnie is over the Ocean', 'Drink to me only', 'Fire down below'*, 'The Jolly Ploughboy', 'The Boatie Rows'*, 'Bingo', 'Now in the month of Maying', 'Where are you going to my pretty maid', 'Solomon Levi, 'Let us with a Gladsome Mind'*, 'The Miller of Dee'*, 'I've lost the Doh of my Clarinet', 'The Mermaid'*, 'Annie Laurie', 'One More River to Cross', 'The Lass of Richmond Hill', 'The Road to the Isles', 'Cock Robin', 'John Brown's Body', 'Green Grow the Rushes-ho!','Goodnight ladies'

There are a few minor errors in the above (understandable in a quick forum post): ‘Now is the Month of Maying’ ( by Thos. Morley, 1595), My Bonny lies over the Ocean etc. The list is entirely in keeping with what can be determined of the show’s ethos at that time, and indeed for some time afterwards; of the 24 songs, six (marked *) appear in later BBC booklet editions within the collection assembled for this research. Other songs (‘Bingo,’ ‘John Brown’s Body’, ‘My Bonny Lies Over The Ocean’ etc) are the kind of simple, repetitive song easily taught by ear over the wireless. A cumulative list song such as ‘Green Grow the Rushes O’ is an ideal choice for such a situation, as the gradual adding of new lyrics is inherent in the song form. We know from the programme’s initial brief that each show was designed to contain three songs: one with a strong chorus (for ease of participation), one with a beautiful melody and one nonsense or doggerel song.115 The very first broadcast fulfilled these criteria with ‘Billy Boy’ providing the easily repeated chorus, ‘Golden Slumbers’ the emphasis on the tune and ‘Michael Finnegan’ to provide ‘a little bit of fun’.116

What is striking about the 1940 list is that so many of these songs were already in common use for various forms of community singing, and had been for some time. If the list above is compared with the index pages of a selection of community songbooks from the five decades preceding WW2, a significant number of the songs listed appear in one or more publication

114 Taken from a thread on the mudcat cafe forum here: http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=154766, posted 18/06/14 at 01:06pm (link defunct as of 23/10/17). Researcher’s full name gathered from provided email address, status as producer confirmed in documentary credits (broadcast 29/11/14). 115 Archive on 4. 116 Cox 1996, 369. 104 (see Table 2 below, p.110).117 These were songs which were already widely known, and which would have been sung in a variety of social contexts. The use of material which was already widely circulated and in common usage would have increased the likelihood that some of the pupils and teaching staff in wartime schools would have already known the material, reinforcing the sung responses of the listening pupils as a whole. In addition, by teaching a repertoire which was common to the nation, the BBC was priming it’s young listeners to be able to participate in other situations where communal song occurred: social clubs, barracks, , and even at home, sat around the still ubiquitous piano.

Community song, at least from the perspective of publishers seeking to profit from it, had a number of sub-divisions within the market. Singing was a popular part of student life in Britain in the first half of the 20th century, just as it had been in Germany with the Wandervogel movement, and later within the American college fraternities.118 British examples were less direct in acknowledging the link between singing and drinking than the earlier German publications that inspired them, but the implied status of the student songbook as a necessary lifestyle accessory remained.119 The Scottish Student’s Song Book was a relatively early example of the genre, albeit one with a seemingly enduring appeal: originally published in 1897, it was still in print in the late 1930s.120 It contained 9 of the songs later to appear on the 1940 list, over 40 years before the war. It should be noted that the seemingly glaring omission the Scottish song ‘Road To The Isles’ is simply explained; the English language poetry of that setting had yet to be published, first appearing with that particular traditional melody in 1917. The Anglo-German Rucksack Song Book grew out of the increased spirit of co-operation between German, Austrian and British students in the decade immediately preceding the Second World War, and sought to represent, without editorial input, the bilingual repertoire which had arisen organically within the context of the hiking, kayaking and other outdoor pursuits which these numerous exchanges had entailed.121 Despite half of the material being in German, which would have been unthinkable in wartime, it still contained five of the songs from the Singing Together list.

117 The choice of songbooks was simply a selection of those my mother, maternal grandmother and great- grandparents had owned and (in the latter cases) used during the period in question. I am obliged to credit my mother’s near infallible musical memory for putting me on the right track with these publications – not only did she know all but one of the songs listed, she also knew where to find them in print. 118 J. Lloyd Winstead, When Colleges Sang: The Story of Singing in American College Life (Alabama, University of Alabama Press, 2013), 70-72. 119John Shepherd & David Horn, Continuum encyclopedia of popular music of the world (London: Continuum, 2012), 607. 120 A. G. Abbie (ed.-in-chief), The Scottish Student’s Song Book (Bayley and Ferguson: Glasgow, 1897). 121 Anon, Anglo-German Rucksack Song Book, Published for the National Union of Students of the Universities and University Colleges of England and Wales (Oxford: OUP, 1936). 105

Newspapers of the day perceived the publishing of community songbooks as a logical extension of their other highly publicized contribution to public-spirited work.122 The Daily Express Community Song Book makes the bold claim to have begun the community singing craze, citing the attendance of ten thousand people at the launch event in the Royal Albert in November 1926, leading to a national movement that filled football stadia within just three months.123 Sixteen of the twenty-four songs used by Singing Together appear within its pages, along with such Nationalist fair as ‘God Save The King’, ‘Rule Britannia’, ‘Hearts of Oak’ and ‘The British Grenadiers’. Whilst the number of books with similar content which predate it suggest that claims of single-handedly starting a movement may have succumbed to the newspaperman’s customary flair for hyperbole, it was certainly successful enough to spawn imitations from rival Newspapers. The News Chronicle Songbook, published eight years later, contains a similar selection of music, including thirteen of the songs chosen for that first wartime summer term.124 The earlier Star Community Songbook presents something of an enigma, as it contains almost no information beyond the music: it holds four songs from the 1940 list, but otherwise the content is similar in both tone and style to the Daily Express and News Chronicle publications.125

Boosey & Hawkes’ publication ‘The New National Song Book’ had a more deliberately educational bent, proudly containing all of the songs recommended for school use by the Board of Education earlier in the year.126 Being focused on British song, the American choices from the 1940 list would not have been eligible for inclusion, but the book still contains seven of the songs. The two volumes of ‘Nelson’s New National And Folk Song Book’, edited by respected music education specialist Desmond MacMahon, were designed to be suitable for school use, with songs recast in keys more accessible to treble voices. The first volume, published in 1938, had four songs from the 1940 list;127 the second part, published the following year, had three.128

122 Shepherd & Horn. 2003, 607. 123 John Goss, Daily Express Community Song Book (London: Daily Express, 1927). The forward has no page number. 124 T. P. Ratcliff (ed.), News Chronicle Song Book (News Chronicle Book Dept., London, 1935). 125 Anon, The Star Community Song Book (London: Paxton & Co.,1900). 126 Charles Villiers Stanford & Geoffrey Shaw, The New National Song Book (London: Boosey & Hawkes Ltd, 1906). 127 Desmond MacMahon, Nelson’s New National And Folk Song Book Part 1 (London: Thos. Nelson & Sons Ltd, 1938). 128 Desmond MacMahon, Nelson’s New National And Folk Song Book Part 2 (London: Thos. Nelson & Sons Ltd, 1939). 106 Only three of the songs from the 1940 list do not appear at least once in the assembled songbooks. 'I've lost the Doh of my Clarinet' is a translation from the original French. 'Let us with a Gladsome Mind’, being a , would be found in protestant hymnals of the time, as indeed it is in ‘Songs Of Praise’.129 The absence of the pseudo Jacobite song 'Come O'er The Stream, Charlie' appears to be a matter of chance: it had been available in print with music since at least 1898, and had appeared as poetry in James Hogg’s collection ‘Song’s By The Ettrick Shepherd’ as early as 1835.130 Of more significance are the songs appearing in multiple publications. If the two volumes of ‘Nelson’s New National And Folk Song Book’ are treated as a single repertoire repository (as they have been in the table below), then ‘Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes’ appears in every single one of the books listed. ‘Annie Laurie’, ‘John Brown’s Body’ and ‘The Miller Of Dee’ appear in five of the six books apiece, although the latter is sometimes listed as ‘The Jolly Miller’. If frequency of publication can be seen as some measure of popularity, then these songs were clearly in consistent public favour for approximately forty years prior to the wartime broadcasts. The BBC was teaching children songs that their parents and even grandparents would have been familiar with.

This series is designed to encourage children to sing together, and to help them build up their repertory of songs.131 (Emphasis added)

The above quote, taken from the Singing Together’s original brief, contains the significant assumption that children would have a use for repertory of songs, and that they would wish to expand it. By choosing songs from an extant canon, already familiar to prior generations, the BBC did not just introduce songs to the nation’s children; it introduced the children to an extant national repertoire. Installing a feeling of camaraderie during wartime, as intimated by Herbert Wiseman above, was part of the brief of the programme. An interview with Brenda Jenkins, a teacher newly qualified during the war, reveals the central importance of the show to the wellbeing of her class of evacuees:

These little children, I’m afraid…I’m afraid some of them were very sad. They were not particularly healthy. The poor little things had contagious diseases, and I would have to take them to the doctors, so it was quite a responsibility. They were only little to be away from their parents, so when it was music lesson, they would be looking forward to it, because they could sing and enjoy themselves and forget about…things

129 Percy Dearmer, Ralph Vaughan-Williams & Martin Shaw (eds.), Songs of Praise with music (Enlarged Edition) (London: OUP, 1931) (first published 1926). 130 Myles B. Foster (ed.), The Songs of Scotland Volume II (Edinburgh, Boosey & Co., 1898), 112-113. 131 Archive on 4, at approx. 00:10:30 (unnamed voiceover). 107 that were difficult for them. Singing always helps – says she who still likes to sing… It didn’t matter whether they sang well or not, nobody bothered, nobody noticed. You all sang because everybody else was singing. The songs were always jolly, they weren’t sad songs, they were always happy ones.132

The show’s ratings suggest that it had clear appeal in this role of raising the spirits across the nation’s classrooms; with 4,000 schools tuning in to the show by 1941, Singing Together had rapidly taken become by far the most popular of the schools broadcasts. Yet the feeling persisted within the BBC that the show did not constitute ‘a proper music lesson’, as demonstrated by this extract from an internal circulation memo, distributed on the 9th of January 1941:

The line I take myself in discussing Singing Together (which is always popular) is to agree that it is a very jolly social occasion, but can hardly be considered musical training133

In fact, the role the show played in wartime had much more in common with the running of a youth club than a school classroom. Published shortly after hostilities ended in Europe, Desmond MacMahon’s Youth And Music was a music leader’s manual, intended to tie in with the new post war Youth Service, which aimed to keep music and drama going beyond school leaving age.134 The ‘equipment’ a music leader in a youth club was deemed to need was the ability to sing ‘an ordinary song’ with the required accuracy and feeling, and to do so in good humour. He (and this hypothetical leader of MacMahon’s imagination is definitely portrayed as masculine throughout, even though the equally hypothetical students are described as ‘he or she’) must also be able to communicate the music effectively to the group:

It is not enough for the leader to care for the music himself, he must know how to present it so that others may care about it too.135

This is essentially a description of the role in which the BBC had cast Herbert Wiseman and his small choir: the wireless as a surrogate youth worker, providing a disembodied voice of confidence and expertise. MacMahon too held singing to be important, believing it to be the most viable tool for youth club music participation. The requirement was for:

132 Archive on 4. (Interview with wartime teacher Brenda Jenkins). 133 Archive on 4. 134 Desmond MacMahon, Youth and Music (London: Thos. Nelson & Sons, 1946), 1. 135 MacMahon, 1946, 2. 108 …community singing, which, quite apart from its musical value, promotes a feeling of good cheer in the individual (if not always the listener), the feeling that comes from being one of a group of people animated by the same purpose.136

This sentiment echoes that of both Wiseman and Jenkins very closely. Not only does MacMahon consider singing able to promote ‘good fellowship combined with good humour’ within the group, and can also be ‘the means of imparting some knowledge of music’, leading to a gradual improvement of ‘the standard of singing and that of musical taste’137. His suggested order of introducing music was to begin with unison chorus songs first (much as Singing Together had done), then a selection of rounds, followed by more complex part songs only when the former were comfortably within the group’s grasp. Accompaniment was not, in his view, mandatory, and having no accompanist was deemed better than having a bad one.138 The BBC had the luxury of very competent accompaniment for their broadcasts, so this latter concern was not transferred; in fact the wireless was largely taking on this role to relieve teachers of the necessity for instrumental training.

The role of the show during wartime differs distinctly from the later decades, but also from the post war 1940s: content, style and intended role were all to change in the aftermath of the conflict. Aural learning would no longer be a of matter necessity after paper rationing was lifted, and the chosen music could be tailored more specifically to a classroom environment, as the pressing need to instil a sense of stability, jollity and camaraderie in the classes of hastily evacuated children would end with the cessation of hostilities Europe. The parallels with MacMahon’s model for youth club work would become less apparent, as the programme aligned itself ever more closely to the peacetime needs of the nation’s schools. As revealed below, exclusively aural learning would be gone from the curriculum by the end of the decade, and the focus would shift away from contemporary popular song towards folk music.

136 McMahon, 1946, 3. 137 Idem. 138 McMahon, 1946, 6. 109

Songs from

‘Singing Together’

April – June 1940 List, as also found Parts

Song Song

(1897) (1906) Folk

Song Song in Community Songbooks available

National

New &

Student’s

at the time. German - Express (1900) (1927) (1935) (1936) Book Book Books

(1938/39) Star New News

Scottish Song The Community Book The Song Daily Community Book The Chronicle Book Anglo Rucksack Book Nelson’s National Song 1&2

Annie Laurie X X X X X X (Bk2)

Bingo X Boatie Rows, The X Cock Robin X X X Come O'er The Stream Charlie Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes X X X X X X X (Bk2) Fire Down Below X X X (Bk1) Goodnight Ladies X X X Green Grow The Rushes – Ho! X I’ve Lost The Doh Of My Clarinet John Brown's Body X X X X X Jolly Ploughboy, The Lass Of Richmond Hill, The X X X X (Bk1) Let Us With A Gladsome Mind Marching Through Georgia X X X X Mermaid, The X X X X X (Bk1) Miller of Dee X X X X X (Bk1) My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean X X X X Now Is The Month of Maying X X (Bk2) One More River To Cross X Road To The Isles, The Solomon Levi X X Upidee X X X Where Are You Going To My Pretty X Maid Table 2: Songs from‘Singing Together’ April – June 1940: The 1940 List

110

2.5.1 Post-War 1940s: A New Beginning

The analysis of the post war 1940s content is based the only available pamphlet:

1948: Autumn Term

Tracing even a single booklet from the 1940s proved to be a challenge. No information was available regarding when the BBC recommenced printing documents to accompany school broadcasting. In more than three years of regularly checking saved searches on several online retail and auction sites, no pamphlets prior the early 1950s came up for sale. The folkinfo archive at Joe-Offer.com had no content prior to 1957. Periodical image searches produced no definitive proof, only a partially cropped image claiming to be a booklet from the late 1940s on Broadcastforschools.com. For several years, this was one of the only clues that pointed towards any published material prior to autumn 1949. Initially, even the existence of an Autumn ’49 booklet was conjecture: a deduction based on the knowledge that a booklet for Summer 1950 had been printed, and it was highly unlikely that the BBC would have begun supplying schools in the middle of an academic year rather than the beginning. A conversation with a veteran choral musician acquaintance in early 2015 seemed to confirm this.

This acquaintance, Mr. Johnson, remembered singing along to the programme aged eleven, at the C of E primary school in Alnwick, Northumberland, during the 1949/1950 school year; he was absolutely certain of the year, having begun attending Grammar School in autumn 1950. The school did not yet have electricity at that time, and he recalled singing by gaslight to a wireless set ‘running off a great big charger and accumulators’. He believed that the pupils had to bring in a sixpence to pay for their own booklets, which he recalled having a plain blue cover with white text. His memory of the content included ‘some Irish songs’ and (one of which was ‘Jesus God Above All Other’). His memory is mostly of having enjoyed and looked forward to the show, and he gave it at least partial credit for his continuing singing to this day; he had kept one of the booklets as a memento up until early 2015, when it was lost during a house move.

A copy of 1948’s autumn term booklet was finally located from a private seller on the Isle of North Uist late in 2015. By chance it was the exact booklet pictured in the partial image

111 discovered prior, and the price of 6D was printed on the cover. Although only five years prior to the first of the available 1950s booklets, the Autumn 1948 booklet feels far older. The front and back cover images are black and white images of photographs depicting panels from Italian renaissance sculptor Luca Della Robbia’s Cantoria (a marble ‘singing gallery’ in Florence cathedral commissioned in the 1430s), depicting classically robed figures singing music read from a book and a large scroll. The inside cover has a photograph of a page from a book of William Byrd’s songs published in 1588, listing ‘reasons briefly set downe by th’author, to perswade every one to learn to sing’: an image used with permission of the British Museum. Illustrations within the book are small, intricate pen-and-ink drawings, similar in style to many of those provided in the 1950s pamphlets, although the artist receives no credit in the 1948 booklet. The paper used has a gloss sheen and slightly slippery texture to it; this kind of finish is not seen again within the series until the format change in 1987.

Two of the folk songs—‘Strawberry Fair’ and the shanty ‘Donkey Riding’—are provided as texts without any musical notation, suggesting that at least part of the folk repertoire was still being taught by ear. This feature of the 1948 pamphlet is unique amongst the collection assembled for this chapter section; none of the 1950s, 1960s or later examples contain songs without provided notation. It seems likely that this is a continuation of the wartime necessity of teaching by ear in the absence of printed booklets, with the conflict having ended only three years prior to the publication and broadcast of this material. Whilst it would have been perfectly possible to learn songs from later period without reading the music (simply by listening to the broadcast), this is the only printed example of concession to the traditional practice of folk song being taught aurally.

Also unique to this pamphlet is the inclusion of hymnody. The last two pages of the Singing Together portion of the booklet contain three hymns. Little information on their provenance is provided, suggesting that they would have been well known to the intended audience. Let Us With Gladsome Mind and Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise can be both found in a hymnal which had been in common schools usage from the latter part of the 1920s: Songs of Praise.139 Neither of the BBC versions of these hymns is accompanied by more than half of the verses originally given in Songs Of Praise, meaning they would have taken only a short time to sing through (the verses being only 8 and 16 bars long respectively). It is more than possible that their inclusion is explained because each broadcast was ended with a hymn, as was the contemporary practice with school assemblies.

139 Dearmer, Vaughan-Williams & Shaw, 1931. 112

Of the 15 songs included:

5 are English folk songs (4 of which were collected by Sharp/Baring Gould) 2 are poems set to a traditional tune (one of Irish, one of Scottish origin) 3 are Christmas/New Year carols (all tunes traditional, 2 of which British) 3 are Hymns 1 is a (relatively contemporary) art piece (Vaughan William’s ‘Linden Lea’).

In total, 11 of the 15 songs are either wholly traditional or have a traditional melody, and of these, ten originate within the British Isles. Whilst this is only a single sample, and thus there is no way to establish to what extent this breakdown is representative of broadcasts from the decade from which it is drawn, it sets a benchmark against which the latter content can be measured. The heavy use of folk material also moves away from the prior youth club style model as set out by MacMahon, who considered the contemporary relevance of songs to be of paramount importance: ‘…it would be little short of disastrous if such a folk song as “Sheep- Shearing” were chosen for the lads of a youth club in an industrial town’.140 In using songs drawn from otherwise easily obtained sources, such as ‘The Oxford Book Of Carols’, Sharp & Baring-Gould’s ‘English Folk-Songs For Schools’ or the common schools hymnal ‘Songs Of Praise’, the BBC was once again drawing on material which would have been in wider circulation, but the focus had begun a shift toward a more child-centric selection of music; pre-existing popularity was no longer the primary selection criterion for the songs.

A Note about Rhythm and Melody: One distinguishing feature that sets the 1940s and 1950s examples apart from those published after 1960 is that the pamphlets were shared across two programmes, the second being Rhythm and Melody. Running from 1942 until the early 1960s, Rhythm & Melody was conceived as a partner programme for Singing Together. Published in the same booklet, the aim was of complementing the immense popularity and accessibility of Singing Together by placing a greater emphasis on teaching skills such as musical and rhythmic literacy, instrumental recognition and music appreciation. Broadcast weekly at 11am, each show ran for eighteen minutes. As Gordon Cox reveals from internal BBC memos, there was a feeling within the corporation that Singing Together should be used as a gateway to more instructive programming that actually taught music, and Rhythm and

140 MacMahon 1946, 4-5. 113 Melody’s focus on the rudiments was a part of that wider strategy.141 Ultimately Rhythm & Melody did not fare as well as Singing Together, with broadcast ceasing in the early 1960s, just a few years after the combined booklet was discontinued in favour of individual publications.

Gordon Cox uncovered archived documents showing that at least one BBC committee secretary considered Singing Together as a short term means to gain greater audience for more overtly instructional broadcasts such as Rhythm and Melody. Rhythm and Melody occupies the second half of each booklet, and was broadcast on the Home Service at 11am on Thursdays during term time. Despite containing a good number of Folk songs, and having a fair degree of cross over with songs from Singing Together when viewed across the course of the decade, the Rhythm and Melody material is not included in content analysis in order to maintain the focus on the single series.

2.5.2 1950s: A More Stable Curriculum

Analysis of the 1950s output is based on the following six volumes:

1953: Autumn Term 1954: Autumn Term 1955: Summer Term & Autumn Terms (this latter copy is damaged and missing the first and last pages)142 1958: Spring Term 1959: Autumn Term

The appearance, layout and illustration of the booklets can tell us almost as much about their intended use and audience as the song choices themselves. The staple-bound booklets of the 1950s, still shared with Rhythm and Melody, are slightly shorter and considerably narrower than the later examples from the 1970s onward, which can probably be attributed to the older Imperial Foolscap paper sizes in use at the time. This gives the 1950s pamphlets a very

141 Cox, 1996, 369. 142 The damage means it is missing the first song, but also missing the information as to which year and term it is intended for. The monochrome colour palette and illustration style placed it clearly as a 1950s example. This year was established by cross referencing the date/day of the week of the “Rhythm and Melody” broadcasts – 22nd September was a Thursday only once during the 1950s, and that was in 1955. The term was easily established due to the presence of Christmas repertoire. 114 distinctive feel in the hand when compared to their later counterparts, and is arguably a more child-friendly size. Despite this, the internal layout of the books shows no particular tailoring towards the intended audience. The text is presented in relatively small print, with a style much like songbooks of the era published for adult consumption. Information such as the source, publisher and rights holder was included on each page below the title, despite being irrelevant to the nine to eleven year old age group who were to be the recipients of the booklets. The only real concession made to the age of the reader was in the illustrations, which are black and white throughout the decade, often pen and ink drawings or woodcuts, usually depicting scenes from the narrative songs within the booklet; being dual use booklets, some of these scenes on the cover were necessarily from the Rhythm and Melody show’s content.

Laid out on the page, each individual song has a bold print title, under which is written the country or region of origin if the song is traditional, or the composer, arranger or lyricist if not. Performance directions, where provided, are given either in the conventional Italian or in English, although there is no obvious reason as to which was chosen for each piece; an English folk song such as ‘The Brisk Young Widow’ has the direction ‘allegro moderato’143, whilst Robert Burn’s ‘Ye Banks and Braes’ is to be sung ‘rather slowly’.144 The provided notation is a single stave melody line with tonic sol-fa annotation above each note, and lyrics to the first verse and chorus below. The presence of several bars rest at the start of some pieces indicates an introduction is expected; this is the only sign that piano accompaniment is to be provided by the radio. There are none of the chord symbols or suggested harmony and rhythm parts which appear in later decades of the show, suggesting a relatively simple model of participation was called for, in keeping with the ethos of the previous decade: singing along to the radio was the BBC required of the listening children.

Turning to the actual broadcasts, the show’s new presenter, William Appleby, was a controversial choice within the corridors of broadcasting house, but appears to have been well received by the school children.145 His cheerful greeting of ‘hello schools’, with which he began each show, was notable for its northern accent: a rarity in an era when Received Pronunciation (RP) was the accepted tone for delivering what became known as BBC

143 Autumn Term, Singing Together (BBC, 1953), 2. 144 Spring Term, Singing Together (BBC, 1958), 7. 145 Archive on 4. 115 English.146 Appleby had succeeded Wiseman during the late 1940s, having previously worked as schools music administrator in Doncaster. Already a capable choirmaster, his charismatic guidance would be the enthusiasm and driving force behind the show until the early 1970s.147 Many of his arrangements of songs for the show were later published for wider use in schools, including notation of his characteristic piano parts.148

Concurrent to developments on the show, 1950s also saw the BBC’s development of schools content for television broadcast. The ‘Middlesex experiment’ saw a series of experimental shows broadcast daily to 6 specially chosen schools in the County throughout May 1952.149 The research and development process was thorough and time consuming, but it allowed the BBC to refine the product before launch, and also to herald the launch of the new series with much publicity. This slow start allowed for an unfortunate side effect, as the new Independent Television Company was able to rush through its own development process, ultimately launching their ITV School broadcasts on the day before the BBC’s much vaunted service was due to begin: the thirteenth of May 1957.150 Sparring between TV companies over the Schools audience was to continue through the following decades, but the BBC’s dominance of school radio was to remain unchallenged.151 The lack of competition from commercial radio stations allowed for the relative stability of the school’s radio schedule continuing into the 1960s and onward, and this in turn protected Singing Together from major changes in direction: the only potential challengers came from within the BBC’s School Radio department itself.

The content of the 1950s booklets was largely drawn from pre-existing books of music for schools, which can be easily verified as the sources and relevant permissions are clearly printed on the same page as the song entry in the pamphlets. Eleven of the sixty-five songs within the six booklets available for the 1950s are taken from ‘The New National Songbook’. The single most used source for the booklets in the 1950s, it had also been a popular source in the previous decade: it contained many of the wartime choices featured in the 1940 list. Published in 1906, and edited by the renowned composers Charles Villiers Stanford and Geoffrey Shaw (both deceased by the 1950s), it had been advertised as containing all of the

146 Anon, ‘Singing Together: The radio show that got children singing’, BBC News Magazine, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30210485, 28/11/2014 (23/10/16). 147 Simon Elmes, Hello Again: Nine decades of radio voices (London: Random House, 2012), 251-252. 148 William Appleby & Frederick Fowler, Sing Together! 100 Songs for Unison Singing (Oxford: OUP, 1967). 149 Crook, 2007, 222. 150 Ibid, 217. 151 Ibid, 223. 116 songs which Arthur Somervell and the BoE had suggested for school use: the very list which had so incensed Cecil Sharp. It should be stressed that the book contains a fair number of genuine folk songs: Sharp’s objection was that it also contained other material that he deemed unacceptable, such as national, historical and art songs. Based on the evidence of the available booklets, the choices taken from it in the 1950s booklets erred towards the traditional rather than the national, rather than the more populist choices drawn from the same source in the 1940 list. Other recurring sources on which the 1950s booklets drew included OUP’s ‘Clarendon Songbook’ series (edited by former Singing Together Presenter Herbert Wiseman), Curwen’s ‘Shanty Book (Part 1 & 2)’, as well as folk song collections by Cecil Sharp, Lucy Broadwood and .

The presentation of the folk songs shows a certain degree of English bias: examples from England often have their county of origin clearly indicated, but Scottish Welsh and Irish songs are not given any further indication of regional roots. Whilst the emphasis within much of the folk material chosen favoured the Home Counties, some concessions were made to regions other than the South of England in the selection and broadcasting of songs. Spring 1958 contained the Welsh song ‘Planting Trees (Plannu Coed)’ with not only an English text (provided by Imogen Holst) but also a full Welsh Language version alongside it.152 This is the only example of a song in any of the sixty assembled booklets across five decades that is completely and equally bilingual, despite thirty-seven non-Anglophone speaking national or linguistic origins being represented throughout the series.153 The lack of any similar examples may be partially explained by the fact that the BBC produced a limited number of specialist Welsh language programmes already, and may well have diverted any such material toward those shows. The closest equivalent to Singing Together was Storïau, Rhigwm a Chân (Stories, Rhymes and Song); a Welsh language Primary Schools programme, broadcast only within Wales from 1948 to 1958.154 Although the exact titles changed during the decade there were, according to Radio Times listings, approximately ten Welsh language programmes for schools at any one time during the 1950s, on subjects such as Geography, Science, Religion and History as well as Music and Language.155 No similar Scottish or Irish programming

152 Spring Term, Singing Together (BBC, 1958), 8. 153 Within this category are Welsh, Irish and Scots, as there is at least one example of songs that had a text originating in the corresponding indigenous Celtic language. Basque and Flemish are also included as regional languages or minority language groups. 154 Anon., ‘Storiau, Rhigwm a Chan’, Broadcast for Schools, http://www.broadcastforschools.co.uk/site/Storiau,_Rhigwm_a_Chan, 31/12/11 (23/10/17). 155 Anon., ‘List of schools programmes broadcast in Welsh’, Broadcast for Schools, http://www.broadcastforschools.co.uk/site/Special:BrowseData/Programmes?Decade=1950s&Presented_in_lang uage=In_Welsh, (23/10/17). NB: Link now generates a lot of code at top of page – scroll down for resource. 117 appears to have been provided by the BBC, nor was it represented within the song choices for Singing Together, although there were attempts to transliterate regional variations of English. Generally, dialect terms arising in the songs are explained in a short glossary on the same page, but there was one exception to this rule. Due to differences in regional school holidays, the song ‘Aiken Drum’ was only taught to schools in and Scotland on Whit Monday 1955, with none of the dialect words ‘translated’ for English listeners, as was otherwise the custom: the eponymous hero’s coat was made ‘…o the gude saut meat’, in which he ‘luiket weel as ye may suppose’. 156

Based on the contents of 6 booklets, and the 65 songs they contain (none of which are duplicated), the breakdown is as follows:

Number of Booklets: 6 Total Number of Songs: 65, no duplicates. Songs from Worldwide Folk Sources: 42, equivalent to 65% of total songs Songs from British Isles Traditions: 28, equivalent to 43.08% of total songs and 67% of folk/trad/world songs present.

The songs selected for the 1950s booklets follow a similar course of Folk, National and Art song (with a limited number of European and American choices) to those found in the 1940s, but have been drawn from a much wider selection of resources, allowing for far greater variety in material. Despite the style of the booklets themselves being somewhat austere, the material was now clearly tailored for a school audience. The sources used, however, were mostly older publications: no attempt was made to select contemporary material, with the most popular book to source material from having been published in 1906. There was no bespoke material created especially for the show as in later decades: every song was drawn from an existing publication already available to schoolteachers who had the resources to purchase them. With approximately four in ten of the songs being drawn from the musical traditions of the British Isles, folk music was an integral part of the show’s curriculum.

156 Summer Term, Singing Together (BBC, 1955), 13. 118 2.5.3 1960s: a Focus on Folk

Analysis of the 1960s output is based on the following 13 examples:

1960: Summer Term 1961: Spring & Autumn* Terms 1962: Spring*, Summer* and Autumn Terms157 1963: Autumn Term 1965: Spring & Summer Terms 1967: Spring and Autumn Terms 1968: Spring and Summer Terms

The first two booklets published in 1960 maintained the format of their 1950s forebears: a logical continuation, as they were thematically part of the three-term set beginning with the autumn term of 1959 (school year of September 1959 to June 1960). The first major change occurred in the following academic year, as the printed material for Singing Together was no longer linked with that of Rhythm & Melody. This had a number of impacts on the way the booklets were presented. Firstly, having the pamphlets dedicated to a single programme allowed more space for illustrations. The Singing Together portion of the Summer 1960 dual programme booklet had 6 pictures, only one of which was larger than a quarter page: a half page stylised view of Noah’s Arc resting on Mount Ararat, attached to the song ‘Old Mister Noah’.158 By contrast, the following term’s single programme booklet had thirteen illustrations spread throughout, five of which were around half a page in size, and the back cover was a full-page illustration.159 This new format also guaranteed that the main front cover picture always related to the songs chosen for Singing Together. From autumn 1963, a single spot colour was added to the black and white drawings, differing with each pamphlet, allowing much more freedom for the illustrator.

Secondly, whilst having fewer pages overall, the number of pages dedicated to ST increased. The previous dual format publications had allowed ten to twelve pages for ST from the twenty or so in each booklet, the new single format booklets allowed fifteen to eighteen pages for the same number of songs. In addition to the previously noted expansion of the

157 The three 1960s examples marked with an asterisk are significant, as the represent the first complete set of three booklets for a single academic year within the collection. This is the first opportunity to examine the BBC’s syllabus for a single school year. 158 Summer Term, Singing Together (BBC, 1960), 6-7, (illus. Graham Oakley). 159 Autumn Term, Singing Together (BBC, 1961), (illus. Sheila Robinson). 119 illustrations, the text and musical notation were able to take up more space for each individual song; fewer verses had to be placed directly under the melody staves, for example. This less cluttered and formal feel is further aided by the removal of the copyright and licensing information from the song pages and consolidating it on the back cover, along with a contents list, clearing the page of any information that was not directly pertinent to the singing. This, combined with a bolder typeface, made the new booklets easier to read than their 1950s counterparts. The overall effect is that the 1960s booklets have the feel of a product designed expressly with the school pupil as the end user; even a casual glance clearly reveals that these are children’s books.

The actual presentation of the songs remained similar in style to those of the previous decade, albeit with larger print, with both standard musical staff notation and tonic sol fa lettering above to cater for readers of both. Unlike the later 1970s booklets, there are no harmony parts, rhythm notations for additional percussion or guitar chords that would imply a more complex level of engagement than simply singing along. The closest the 1960s booklets come to introducing part song is in the Spring 1967 booklet, in which the Somerset folk song ‘The Keys of ’ is presented as a gender divided dialogue between a male and female protagonist, with the divisions marked either ‘He’ or ‘She’, depending on whether girls or boys were expected to sing each of the eight verses.160

The change in tone to a more child friendly style was not necessarily met with approval, at least in musical terms: this was largely due to the inherently safe nature of the presented material. The Archive on 4 documentary’s interview with folk scholar (and EFDSS gold badge winner) stressed his delight when the sanitized versions of folk songs he’d learned from the show turned out to have more ribald lyrics when encountered in later life. Also interviewd by Archive on 4 was John Leonard (in later life the producer of Radio 2’s Folk Show), whose recollections of the show’s folk song offerings from his schooldays in the 1960s were less than favourable:

In the early 60s everybody was listening to the radio, and I remember being able to walk down past these terraced houses and every door was open in the summer, and you could hear a bit of the programme as you passed each door. And I remember things like ‘Early One Morning’ drifted out. You know, songs about people buying brooms and meeting women, and it was all presented (for me) in a rather clean, sanitised, BBC version of what folk music was. As I learned more about folk music, and realised it was actually about murder and death and plague and love and lost love, and these songs were little films that you could get into. It didn’t come across to me

160 Spring Term, Singing Together (BBC, 1967), 6-7. 120 with Singing Together, it didn’t really appeal to me, because on the other side what I was hearing was also and the Stones and Elvis and the Everly Brothers, and that was the music that drew me. This kind of clean-cut “folk” music that was on the radio really didn’t do it for me with this tsunami of Rock ‘n’ Roll coming at me. I think that the way they cleaned it up… it just seemed like one step up from ‘Listen With Mother’ to me.161

On closer inspection however, the folk content was not without potentially controversial lyrics. The spring 1967 booklet’s first song is entitled ‘The Jolly Carter’. On the surface it appears to be merely a song about a country lass catching a lift with a passing waggoner, but to a reader with more than a passing familiarity with the British folk song canon the text is clearly one long double-entendre, and not in any way suited to an audience of children. The last three verses should provide an adequate illustration:

So I hastened my horses to walk by her side, And I said to the damsel ‘My dear, won’t you ride?’ Well done, Robin, drive on Robin. Drive a-long. Robin, right-o and gee-woa!

I put my arm round her and gave her a kiss. She said ‘You can take me, young man, if you wish’ Well done, Robin etc.

I spoke to my forehorse, he jingled his bell, And that was his music as no tongue can tell. Well done, Robin etc.162

Whilst is possible that somebody at the BBC was having a joke with teachers at the children’s expense, it seems more likely they had naively assumed it was a simple, jolly ditty on the subject of rustic hitch-hiking; an impression re-enforced by the half-page illustration of a bucolic rural idyll, complete with cheery maid and carter genteelly waving to one another. The source of the song being a reputable publisher (OUP), it may never have even been questioned.

One surprising aspect of the booklets published to accompany the 1960’s broadcasts is the sheer amount of allusion to war, soldiery and other military matters in the visual imagery. Of the six volumes available from the 1950s, none of the covers depict military personnel or equipment, and only four of the sixty-six songs are of an overtly martial nature (equivalent to approx. 6%). Of the twelve volumes available from the 1960s, five depict either soldiery or

161 Archive on 4. (John Leonard quoted at approx 00:23:31 to 00:24:48). 162 Spring Term, Singing Together (BBC, 1967), 2-3. 121 weaponry on the cover page illustration (equating to 40%) but of the one hundred and fifteen songs that are included, only ten are expressly military in nature (equivalent to approx. 9% of the total). Given that this represents only a slight rise of approximately three percent of martially themed content, the choice of militaria for 5 out of twelve covers seems somewhat at odds with the songs behind them. Given the stated earlier policy of ‘appealing to boys’, perhaps this is an attempt to pander to presumed male interest.

Number of Booklets: 13 Total Number of Songs: 115 Songs from Worldwide Folk Sources: 93, or 81% of total Songs from British Isles Traditions: 59, or 51.3% of total (63% of Folk/Trad/World total)

With approximately 8 out of 10 songs drawn from world folk traditions, and over half of all the songs being from traditions of the British Isles, folk musics became the central pillar of the show’s curriculum during the 1960s. The continuing adaption of the published style to better fit its target audience changed the feel of the booklets to one more obviously suited to the classroom, and the content became correspondingly more accessible, with less archaic language throughout.

2.5.4 1970s: A World of Music

Analysis of the 1970s output is based on the following 18 examples, which include at least one example from each year of the decade:

1970: Spring Term 1971: Summer Term 1972: Summer Term 1973: Spring Term 1974: Spring and Autumn Terms 1975: Spring, Summer and Autumn Terms 1976: Spring, Summer and Autumn Terms 1977: Spring Term 1978: Spring and Summer Terms 1979: Spring, Summer and Autumn Terms

122

The popularity and ubiquity of the radio in British schools was to reach a peak in the 1970s; by the school year of 1972-73, an estimated 90% of schools in the UK were tuning in to at least part of the BBC’s school radio series, of which there were now around 80 programmes, covering a broad variety of subjects.163 This broad popularity would seem to be reflected in the second hand availability of the booklets: 1970s examples are the most commonly encountered for sale, whether online or in brick-and-mortar retailers. In addition to the collection of sixty pamphlets amassed for this chapter, there is also a selection of duplicate examples, more than half of which are from the 1970s. The only reason that the 1980s examples in this collection outnumber the 1970s booklets is that the majority of the later pamphlets arrived as part of a single donation from a school collection.

The most striking difference between the 1970s pamphlets and their predecessors is the increase in printable area per page of approximately 42.5%.164 The average total number of songs did not change; each booklet contained between 15 and 20 pages, holding between 8 and 11 songs, with a mean average of approximately 10 songs per term over the course of the entire decade.165 As a general rule, there were fewer illustrations per booklet, but those that were included were larger than previous decades—full page, half-page and double half-page spreads were commonplace. From 1971, two colour overlays were used in addition to the black and white, greatly expanding the scope for the illustrators. Comparing Spring 1970 to Spring 1968 (the first and last example I have from their respective decades), the text size in very similar on the page, but the notation is printed larger. In addition, the 1970s books contain parts: chord symbols, set accompaniments, ostinati, counter melodies, interludes and introductions are all present in some form during the decade, often printed in a contrasting colour to the main melody. Do-Re-Mi lettering and breathing marks are also included, with the latter being a new feature.

To give a single example of the above, the Canadian folk song ‘She’s Like The Swallow’ is presented with the melody printed in the grey/black primary colour of the print, with a specified introduction, additional ostinato part printed beneath in the contrasting orange hue found throughout that particular booklet, beneath which is printed a triangle part.166 The song is in the less common 6/4 time, in the key of D Minor, with the performance direction

163 Crook 2007, 223. 164 The old size being 296.7cm2 versus the new format of 423cm2. 165 179 songs across 18 volumes gives an average of 9.94 songs per booklet. 166 Spring Term, Singing Together (BBC, 1976), 8-9. 123 andante e legato, chord symbols, and breathing marks: an altogether more complex proposition than man of the choices presented in previous decades. The complexity and variety of the parts increased throughout the decade, and some songs had additional parts published in a separate teacher’s manual. This supplemented the series with additional material, extra background information and potential discussion topics, with the aim of increasing classroom versatility for teachers looking to utilise the booklets outside of the hours of broadcast.

Another new feature was the request show. Each booklet contained a deadline for children to write in and specify their three favourite songs from each term on a postcard, the results of which would be counted and form the content of the last show of each term. This allowed the listening children a greater degree of interaction with the programme than had previously been possible, and potentially provided useful feedback about their content choices to the BBC. Both the request show offering preferential choice, and the increase in the number of ways in which pupils could engage musically with the show demonstrate an increased attempt to create a sense of connection with—and emotional investment in—the show: the children were being given the chance to make the show their own to a degree not previously possible.

From the mid ‘70s, an increasing amount of the content was produced by a partnership between the show’s new producer, the composer and choir leader Douglas Coombes, and the lyricist and children’s author John Emlyn-Edwards. The pair were able to generate bespoke content for the series where needed, allowing for stronger thematic links between the pieces in any given booklet by filling any gaps with specially written songs. Whilst Coombes is often not credited for the composition of a melody in the BBC pamphlets, it is possible to trace his authorship in instances where a publishing company (such as Lindsay Music) has subsequently issued the songs for sale in separate collections. Other collaborations included re-workings of folk songs from across the globe, in accordance with Coombes’ perception of a change in the show’s demographic:

When we visited schools (as I did regularly) you saw that there was such wide ethnic grouping there, so I always tried to include songs {not just from} the West Indies, but increasingly songs from all round the world, you know: from South Africa, from South America, from Russia. I just felt it was important because, through folk songs, people have a better knowledge of countries and cultures.167

167 Archive on 4. (Quote from Douglas Coombes). 124 Following this approach, Emlyn-Edwards was able to re-write lyrics for songs from non- Anglophone traditions, making them more accessible to the English speaking audience in British schools. Whilst this certainly widened the range of world musics available from a melodic and rhythmic viewpoint, it was certainly a compromise from a cultural perspective. As an example, ‘Pedro Go Go Pescador’, from the summer term of 1975, retains very little of the Portuguese language beyond the title refrain.168 This treatment included renderings of songs from some of the other languages native to the British Isles. English versions of traditional Welsh songs from the 1970s onwards were often Emlyn-Edwards’ work, although other writers provided the majority of Irish Gaelic and Scots translations. This drive for Anglicisation was not always present in the sources from which the songs were drawn. The song ‘Tarantella’, printed in the booklet for the Spring Term of 1976, is a case in point.169 A lightly humorous song, originally in Italian (somewhat stereotypically extolling the virtues of Macaroni), only English words are provided in the BBC version. This had not been the case when the song was originally published for use in British schools four years earlier, in a book entitled 35 Songs From 35 Countries.170 The compiler, Geoffrey Brace, had taken considerable care in providing the words of many of the song in both the original tongue and an English translation, including phonetic transliteration from languages with non-Latin alphabets, and hints to aid the more difficult pronunciations. In his preface, Brace stresses the desirability of using the original language when learning the song, enlisting the help of a native speaker if possible; ‘The English version’, he states, ‘will always detract something from the song’s nature’.171 Evidently the BBC took the view that accessibility was of greater importance than authenticity in this regard.

Despite the drive to create a more diverse and culturally aware canon of songs, the 1970s broadcasts attracted controversy on a number of occasions due to perceived cultural insensitivity. The Archive on 4 programme highlighted a number of issues.172 There were complaints about stereotyping of the Irish from 1973 in a song called ‘Here Come The Navvies’. The choice of ‘Ave Maria’ was interpreted by hard-line Protestant schools in Northern Ireland as evidence of a BBC bias towards Catholicism. ‘Hunting the Hare’, a traditional Welsh song translated into English, caused controversy by promoting ‘jolly hunting’ and glorifying blood sports, reports of which found their way into the press when classes rebelled and refused to sing it. In the Archive on 4 voice over, Douglas Coombes was

168 Summer Term, Singing Together (BBC, 1975). 169 Spring Term, Singing Together (BBC, 1976), 10-11. 170 Geoffrey Brace, 35 Songs From 35 Countries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). 171 Brace, 1972: no page numbers are provided in the book, but the song is number 3 of 35. 172 Archive on 4. 125 at pains to point out that many of the complaints were received when the term’s proposed song list was published, but before the booklets had been distributed or broadcasting had commenced, and thus the context had not yet been established.173

No excuses can be made for the inclusion of an American song entitled ‘Old Zip Coon’ in the spring term booklet for 1970.174 Even if the editor was somehow genuinely unaware of the offensive nature of that particular epithet—a luxury which is unlikely to have been afforded black children encountering the song in classrooms up and down the country, or facing it in the playgrounds afterwards—the fact that the song had its origins in black-faced minstrelsy performances should have been reason enough to pass it over for inclusion. At least the accompanying illustration does not compound the error, focussing on a town square in which a group of (noticeably all white) citizens in Victorian dress flee an irritating fiddle player. Alienating religious or ethnic minorities within the classroom setting was certainly not within the programme brief, but clearly more care could have been taken to avoid such discrimination. Discriminatory language was also in evidence when relating to subjects closer to home. ‘The Stranger in Cork’ (to be sung ‘humorously’) is a story of a Welsh man’s amusement at the way speak whilst visiting County Cork.175 The characterisation of both ‘Paddy’ and ‘Taffy’ (they are rendered as such) are problematically stereotypical, from their naming and phraseology to the way their individual idioms are rendered in print. Whilst no complaints in print from Welsh or Northern Irish schools have come to light, by the mid 70s the BBC saw the need to edit similar content to be less potentially offensive. A traditional was re-named ‘Patrick on the Railroad’ rather than the usual ‘Paddy’, with the eponymous hero (who formed the subject of both the cover illustration and a small cartouche on the song page itself) now referring to himself as ‘Pat’.176

1970s Summary:

Number of Booklets: 18 Total Number of Songs: 179 Songs from Worldwide Folk Sources: 152, or 85% of total songs Songs from British Isles Traditions: 75, or 41.9% of total song (49% of Folk/Trad/World subtotal)

173 Archive on 4. 174 Spring Term, Singing Together (BBC, 1970). 175 Ibid, 7. 176 Spring Term, Singing Together, (BBC, 1975). 126

The percentage of folk musics remained very similar to that of the previous decade, but the focus shifted towards world musics, in line with the diversity policy intimated by Coombes. Whilst these attempts were sometimes flawed in their execution, the aim was entirely justified given the changing demographic of British schools. Having played such a prominent role in previous decades, it is unsurprising that there would be a shift away from British folk song to accommodate this. Whilst this may seem disappointing from the stance of folk music education, having the traditional music of the British Isle placed in a more detailed international cultural context can be seen as a positive move. The diversity came at the cost of a degree authenticity however, as the many original languages were not used. The emphasis on creating and/or adapting material specifically for the show was a major departure from previous decades, and would be built on and expanded during the remainder of the show’s run.

2.5.5 1980s: Change in the Air

The analysis of the 1980s output is based on the following 19 examples (none available for 1988):

1980: Autumn, Spring and Summer terms 1981: Spring and Summer terms 1982: Autumn and Spring terms 1983: Autumn, Spring and Summer terms 1984: Autumn and Summer terms 1985: Spring and Summer terms 1986: Summer term 1987: Autumn and Spring terms (format change) 1989: Autumn and Spring terms (format reverted)

Booklets from the 1980s largely follow the same format as the 1970s examples, although 1987 saw a brief departure to a slightly more streamlined style with no title page: this format was abandoned the following school year in favour of the previous style. Minor details, such as where the contents list or copyright information appears within the publication vary, but the presentation of the songs remains largely comparable. The illustrations became increasingly cartoon-like as the decade progressed, although stopping short of outright

127 caricature, with the illustrated characters displaying more exaggerated facial expressions and movements. The layouts became more cluttered as the decade progressed, as the complexity of the included music increased, and coloured box-out sections containing rounds or shorter songs were tagged onto the same page as longer pieces. 1984’s version of ‘’, arranged by John Gardner, runs to three pages, and includes two key changes (from G up to Ab and then A), three contrapuntal vocal parts in two different print colours as well as chord symbols, solfeggi and breath marks, repeats and second time bars: in all probability a satisfying piece to perform, but arguably rendered inaccessible to the less expert musicians in the class by the complexity of the notation and arrangement.177 Ab is far from an easy key for aspiring guitarists reading the chord symbols, for example, especially when the quick key changes either side of that section would make the use of a capo unfeasible.

The number of songs per booklet showed the greatest degree of variation within the 1980s pamphlets. Taken as a mean average across all 19 available booklets, the song count was 11.2 per booklet, but the range spans between 8 and 16 songs, with a steep rise towards the end of the decade: the three books with the highest song counts of 14, 15 and 16 songs are all from ’87-’89. Page counts increased in step with the rise in song numbers, with the highest being 26 for the autumn term ’89 booklet. Part of the reason for this is the inclusion of more rounds and other shorter song forms. Another major change was the inclusion of popular song, with offerings from the repertoire of Van Morrison, and Shakin’ Stevens all appearing within the 1980s repertoire.178 Songs from feature films and animations were also selected: Harry Belafonte’s ‘Island In The Sun’179 (from the Twentieth Century Fox 1957 film of the same name), Disney’s ‘The Bare Necessities’180 (from 1967’s ‘The Jungle Book’), and ‘Walking in the Air’181 (from the Raymond Brigg’s animation ‘The Snowman’, 1982) were all used in the latter half of the decade (only ‘Island In The Sun’ appears prior to this, in a 1983 booklet).

By the mid 1980s, there is evidence to suggest that the creative impulse behind the shows was beginning to founder. Spring 1985’s booklet is a near exact reprint of the one from Spring 1983; every one of the 11 songs set identically, with Barry Parman’s drawings in place exactly as before. The two editions are indistinguishable apart from the date when viewed

177 Autumn Term, Singing Together (BBC 1984), 16-18. 178 Anon, ‘Singing Together: The radio show that got children singing’, BBC News Magazine, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30210485, 28/11/2014 (23/10/16). 179 Spring Term, Singing Together (BBC, 1985). 180 Autumn Term, Singing Together (BBC, 1987). 181 Ibid. 128 from the front, and other than that the only discernable differences between the two printings are in the copyright details in a small area of boxed text on the back cover. Even when considered on its own merits, the Spring1983 pamphlet has at least six songs which had already been used in the series. This feeling of ‘tiredness’ within the series was compounded by the increasing efforts, as the decade wore on, to create more ‘up-to-date’, bespoke material. The disadvantage of attempting to be relevant to a specific moment is that the material will become dated relatively quickly. This is especially true when attempting to adopt the idioms of contemporary popular music, as the shifting tides of fashion within mainstream culture can be difficult to predict. A synth-pop style track written to be in keeping with the chart music of 1989 would have seemed horribly dated by the autumn of 1991, as the previously obscure local Seattle scene of bands such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Sound Garden broke internationally: the ‘sell by’ date on pop is both short and changeable. The lead times of each booklet in terms of selecting and arranging the songs, designing the booklets, printing etc. are not known, but these processes must all happen well before the broadcast dates due to the need to distribute the pamphlets, and thus the present they were written for will always-already be in the past to the targeted listeners. The more timeless nature of folk songs, with their portrayal of what often amounts to a generic vision of the past, had the distinct advantage of never seeming to age further: the show was still re-using folk material from the 1950s in the 1980s.

1980s Summary:

Number of Booklets: 19 Total Number of Songs: 191 Songs from Worldwide Folk Sources: 142, or 74% of total Songs from British Isles Traditions: 69, or 36.13% of total (49% of folk/trad/world subtotal)

Although the percentage of world folk music lessened slightly to accommodate more popular music and bespoke curriculum focussed material during the 1980s, the percentage within the total folk music content that originated from the British Isles actually remained constant. There were clear signs that the show’s producers were under pressure to effect change, revealed by the changes in both quantity and nature of content, the change in production team (Douglas Coombes was replaced by Janet Wheeler in 1988), the format changes in the latter third of the decade and the rapid rise in song numbers towards the end of the period would all

129 suggest that the BBC was responding to a perceived need for change within the programme. The repeated content of the spring 1985 booklet was perhaps prophetic, as the within a decade the show would cease to produce new content as audiences declined to the point where the show was ultimately no longer viable.

2.5.6 1990s: Decline and Disappearance

The analysis of the 1990s output is based on the following 3 examples:

1990: Spring & Summer Terms 1991: Spring Term

The 1990s booklets were actually more similar in style to the later 1970s examples than the 1980s examples that immediately preceded them, with less complex arrangements and a more open and easily read page layout. The main feature that distinguishes the ‘90s from the ‘70s books (apart from the cartoon-like illustrations) was that there were more distinct attempts at creating classroom activities for outside of the broadcast hours. In the 1990 Summer term booklet, the song ‘A turtle called Myrtle’ (a Dave Corbett composition) was followed by a page of rhythm exercises intended to teach the 5/4 : a confusing addendum to that particular song, as it was in 3/4 throughout. The exercises included a spoken round, and some rhythm patterns that could be used to create a short percussion piece exploring the time signature. In addition to the rhythm work, there were two proposed song and tunewriting exercises. The first was a response to the song ‘The Scarecrow’, in which the children were given a chord sequence and a short set of lyrics to use as a basis to write a melody to ‘make up a song of past times’. The second was a two-page spread, in which the class was encouraged to create two contrasting pieces of music: Night Time in the Country, and Dawn in the City. Each piece (one on either page) was given a suggested range of notes and some visual and written stimuli to respond to, which were to be played on tuned percussion. In returning to radio inspired composition, the BBC was recalling the pioneering work of Walford Davis from over sixty years before: if it had been deemed an unsuccessful approach by the BBC before the War, why was it brought back now? The answer was most probably that the producers were grasping at straws: the simple fact was that the show was failing.

130 As the Archive on 4 documentary attested, it was clear as the show entered 1990s that the show was struggling to maintain its audience in the face of increasingly stiff competition from other media forms: recorded audio and video resources for schools were widely available, re- usable and could be employed at the teacher’s discretion, rather than at the hour of broadcast.182 New producers were brought in to modernise the show, commissioning new bespoke material with greater cross-curricular integration: a feature increasingly demanded by teachers as the decade progressed. A new host, former Dr Who star Sophie Aldred, was brought in with the hope of increasing the show’s appeal. The introduction of the National Curriculum in 1997 was to be the death knell for the show:

It petered out, fizzled out. Ultimately, it was down to audience figures because at that time teachers were under a lot of pressure to make sure that everything they did tied in with the National Curriculum… We re-fashioned some of the music programmes to deliver what teachers were after, as well as what children would enjoy, but I think it was harder to make Singing Together fit that mould as far as teachers and Heads were concerned… I think it's a shame really because the one thing about Singing Together, as opposed to a more sort of curriculum-led series, is it was a bit of fun.183

The show ceased to produce new content ‘in the mid 1990s’, and continued by running repeats for several years before it was taken off air. The impression given by the Archive on 4 documentary is that the BBC themselves appear to have no clear idea of the exact date when this transition occurred. The schedules recorded on Broadcastforschools.com are incomplete for the 1990s, but Singing Together is clearly present in the Spring 1994 schedule, albeit broadcasting on multiple smaller stations and at several different times: Radio 5 at 09:45am on a Tuesday morning in England, at 11am the same day on BBC Radio Scotland and at 14:55 on BBC Radio Cymru.184 There is an image of the front cover of the relevant booklet from Summer 1994, which does not correspond to any other booklet that I have seen, depicting as it does what appears to be an ill judged pantomime caricature of a man in Imperial Chinese dress, complete with long moustache and pigtail, being spun around in high winds. This unique illustration would at least suggest that the content was still original at this juncture, as the previous booklet of repeats (Spring 1985) had been re-printed identically to the first broadcast year (1983). The schedule for new school year in the autumn of 1998 has

182 Archive on 4. 183 Anon, ‘Singing Together: The radio show that got children singing’, BBC News Magazine, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30210485, 28/11/2014 (23/10/16). 184 Anon, Schedules: Spring 1994’, Broadcast for Schools, http://www.broadcastforschools.co.uk/site/Schedule:Spring_1994, 27/04/11 (23/10/17). 131 no sign of the show in its listings, which would suggest that the show ceased broadcasting repeats no later than 1997.185 There was a brief revival attempt the following decade (still using old material), but that was no longer on air by 2004. It had partly fallen victim to its own longevity: any show still running from 1939 would have struggled to appear fresh and relevant at the turn of a new millennium.

Singing Together’s demise was not an isolated case, as by the late 1990s all of the BBC’s children’s radio was struggling to remain seen as a relevant and justifiable use of the license fee. The long running song and story show ‘Listen with Mother’ had ceased broadcasting in 1982, although some of its story serials were run as repeats on such programmes as ‘Listening Corner’. The last bastion of serialised children’s drama on Radio 4, occupying the half hour after long running soap opera ‘’ (at 19:00 on evenings) was cancelled in 1998. The only remaining children’s show on analogue radio, the literary magazine show ‘Go4it’, limped on until 2009. Audience surveys showed that on at least one occasion, not a single one of the show’s target audience of 4 to 14 year olds had tuned in: the average age of the listeners on that occasion was 52.186 This final ‘noble attempt’ (in the words of the BBC Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer) to ‘bring back an audience that had gone’ had failed after ten years of trying, and with it the last dedicated children’s show on mainstream British radio ended: all future children’s programming was to be relegated to the Corporation’s digital and online services.

2.5.8 1990s Summary:

Number of Booklets: 3 Total Number of Songs: 31 Songs from Worldwide Folk Sources: 11, equivalent to 35% of total. Songs from British Isles Traditons: 8, equivalent to 25.81% of total, (73% of folk/trad/world subtotal)

Whilst the number of available booklets from the last years of the show is perhaps too small to draw more than broad generalised conclusions from, the content examined portrays a show attempting to transform itself into a teaching resource rather than a live participation event.

185 Anon., ‘Schedules: Autumn 1998’, Broadcast For Schools, http://www.broadcastforschools.co.uk/site/Schedule:Autumn_1998, 27/04/2011 (23/10/17). 186 Ben Dowell, ‘Radio 4 ditches last remaining children's series’, Online, http://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/mar/17/radio-4-axes-childrens-show-go4it, 17/03/2009 (23/10/17).

132 Whilst this may have been consistent with what the BBC felt that teachers wanted from them, it was a departure from the essential nature of the show that had lead to its prior longevity and success. The attempts at revival hint that there was still at least some demand for the show after its cancellation, but ultimately the survival of the show had been tied to the medium of its broadcast, and the days of school radio playing an influential role in schools had passed.

2.6 Singing Together Overall Summary

Number of Booklets: 60 Total Number of Songs: 596 Songs from Worldwide Folk Sources: 450, or 76% of total Songs from British Isles Traditions: 247, or 41.44% of total (55% of folk/trad/world subtotal).

Perhaps most importantly, with an average percentage of 76% of the content being drawn from folk and world musics, of which over half were from British and Irish traditions, these figures make a clear case for viewing the entirety of Singing Together as a folk music education initiative that was unprecedented in both scale and longevity. The fact that this appears to have been an almost accidental by-product of a radio show hastily assembled as a wartime stopgap, that then happened to go on to achieve unanticipated popularity for over half a century, is almost immaterial: no other project within the British Isles has run on a national scale, in a significant percentage of primary schools, for fifty-seven years. There are quite simply no parallels to a project of this scale within the British Isles, yet despite this, Singing Together has received no significant academic attention from scholars of folk song, and scant regard from education historians (Gordon Cox excepted). This could partly be attributed to the fact that Singing Together was never presented as being expressly about folk music, but about participatory singing as a wider cause.

Using the overall average figures above, we can calculate some rough figures to give an idea of the impact the show may have had in teaching folk song over the course of the entire broadcast run: these are intended to show possibilities in the correct order of magnitude, rather than to assert definite numerical values to define the impact of the show. Truly accurate figures would require some information that is not currently available. Firstly, it would require that the database included every single booklet published; as it stands, this analysis is

133 based on sixty examples from across a forty-three year period. Assuming, based on the assembled evidence, that publishing of booklets started in the autumn term of 1948, and that three per school year were then published until the summer term of 1997, the projected total of books published would be one hundred and forty four, albeit with the probability of at least three years worth of re-prints within that time frame. Unfortunately, this would still discount the period from September 1939 to June 1948, as there is little available information as to what was broadcast prior to the introduction of the booklets.

Archival absence is in fact a major issue when attempting to study the entirety of the series. In the forty years between the show’s beginnings and 1979, assuming an average of ten broadcasts per term, and thus thirty shows per year, Singing Together would have broadcast approximately 1,200 shows to schools. The BBC have recorded evidence of only three shows from those four decades, equating to just a quarter of one percent of the total output of the series.187 Whilst this may seem at first glance to be negligent in the extreme, there are a number of explanations as to why the BBC did not choose to document this series. Firstly, at the outset of Singing Together in 1939, the BBC archives were relatively new; prior to 1936 no such department had existed. According to Simon Rooks (head of BBC archive policy at the time of writing) it was only when the Corporation sought to celebrate its first decade in broadcasting that the lack of any past recordings became evident. In the event, they had no choice but to recreate those early programmes by hiring the same casts and performers to remake the shows, but the lesson of the urgent need of documentation was learned.188 Secondly, recording technology was initially complex, cumbersome, expensive and rare, and thus only broadcasts of national importance were recorded for posterity.189 Thirdly, in the words of the archive founder Marie Slocombe, ‘The primary aim of the Archives as a whole has been to collect and preserve documentary sound of firsthand interest for future broadcasting.’190 This was an era where the vast majority of BBC content was broadcast live. Indeed in the early days, the public view of pre-recorded radio was that it was somehow less authentic than a simultaneous live broadcast, and the Radio Times was obliged to notify the listeners in print if a broadcast was to be pre-recorded.191 With the Archive’s forward-looking focus, broadcasts past were of lesser interest than potential future broadcasts; there was little need to preserve any programme that would not be broadcast again. In the case of Singing

187 Archive on 4, approx. 00:25:05. 188 BBC, ‘An Interview with Simon Rooks, BBC Sound Archivist’, BBC Archive, http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/sound_archive.shtml?chapter=2, n.d., (23/10/17). 189 Slocombe, 1964. 190 Ibid, 3. 191Simon Rooks interview, cited above. 134 Together this was doubly true. Each new term had its own bespoke, never-to-be-repeated list of repertoire, and thus every programme became obsolete the second it went out on air. Lastly, schools and education programming was seen as somewhat ephemeral and thus not placed highly amongst the hierarchy of archival priorities, not least because of its perceived limited future commercial potential.192

The second missing parameter is the number of participants. We cannot know for certain how large those cohorts of listening children actually were. Joint Radio Audience Research Ltd (RAJAR) is the organisation that currently oversees the gathering of audience data on behalf of both the BBC and some commercial radio stations within the UK, and also handles the issuing of related research contracts to third party organisations.193 As part of this role, they hold records of audience figures for radio shows, but unfortunately their records do not extend to include figures gathered before their first contract (awarded in 1992), and has no quarterly figures publicly available from before March 1999: after Singing Together’s long broadcast run. Earlier figures from the BBC’s own Daily Survey are not publicly available, and prior to the Corporation’s adoption of regular audience surveys such figures are to be found scattered through internal memos and personal correspondence, rather than stored in any kind of database. As discussed previously, according to Crook, the early 1970s saw an estimated 90% engagement rate of UK schools with BBC radio schools programmes.194 If even a mere 10% of British schools were using Singing Together, it would imply an unprecedented level of participation in a folk music education drive.

Establishing the precise number of individual children participating in the show is also currently impossible, but we can tentatively establish some possible upper and lower parameters for the figure. Douglas Coombes’ various online presences make the claim that the combined audience for his two shows (Singing Together and Time & Tune) peaked in the region of two million listeners weekly.195 No secondary internal BBC source has come to light to verify or challenge these figures, and thus they must be treated with a degree caution. However, even if Coombes is exaggerating to the extent of doubling the figure, and with an extremely conservative estimate that the audience split was heavily in favour of Time & Tune

192 Archive on 4, 29/11/14. 193 Anon., RAJAR, ‘About the organisation’, Radio Joint Audience Research, http://www.rajar.co.uk/content.php?page=about_organisation, n.d., (23/10/17). 194 Crook, 2007, 223. 195 Lindsay Music, ‘Douglas Coombes conductor page’, Musicians Gallery, http://www.musiciansgallery.com/start/conductors/coombes/douglas.htm, n.d., (23/10/17). 135 to the extent of a 75% bias, we could still expect around a quarter of a million participants weekly during the peak popularity of Singing Together: this would be far larger than any other folk music teaching initiative during the same period. Of course, this figure is conjecture, and is not intended to be read as hard fact, but neither is it unrealistic: Coombes’ tenure on the show (1968 to 1988) coincided with the peak schools radio participation figure given by Crook above. If Coombes is not significantly exaggerating his audience figures (there is no evidence to suggest that he is), and assuming Singing Together’s popularity remained pre-eminent within the total music offering of the BBC, the figure may have well been closer to a million or more listeners per week at the peak of its popularity. Wherever the true figure lies between those two extreme estimates, this was still the single largest concerted participatory folk music education initiative to have occurred within the UK: the question of how much by is almost immaterial.

For a scale of comparison, the largest single project that the EFDSS has undertaken since the purchase of Cecil Sharp House in 1930 is ‘The Full English’, digitising a vast amount of archived materials for free public access, and promoting their use through a national series of study days, and a tour by prominent artists making use of the material. The schools education section of this project, The Full English Learning Programme, worked in nineteen schools nationwide with thirty teaching staff, engaged ‘over 2,000’ children, and was considered a notable success by the EFDSS and its funding partners.196 Indeed, by any standards it was a large and far reaching undertaking, and does not bear direct comparison to Singing Together in terms of the way the work was delivered. With that caveat in place, compare the 19 schools that were engaged in this flagship project with the 4,100 schools that Cox asserts were tuning into Singing Together during the early years of the war. Even if we assume that the average listening figures were a mere 10% of the lower projected peak estimate of 250,000 listeners (thus arriving at a projected average listenership of 25,000 children) then Singing Together would still have reached more than ten times the number of children, and would have done so for half a century longer, and may have reached many times more than that. Of course, numbers are not necessarily a measure of success (the Full English was expressly designed to provide a deeper, more local exploration of folk arts), but the figures do provide a useful comparison of the kind of engagement figures expected of a large scale contemporary folk education project: Singing Together was clearly working on a much larger scale.

196 Alison Daubney, with Rachel Elliot & Frances Watt, How Folk Music, Dance and Drama inspired learning in schools: case studies, outcomes and resources from the Full English learning project (London: EFDSS, 2014). 136 Turning to the material that was broadcast, we can use the averaged figures from the entire course of the show to create a rough ballpark estimate of the number of folk songs actually taught. 596 songs, divided by 60 booklets, gives an average of 9.97 songs per booklet. Rounding that up to 10 songs per booklet, and with 3 booklets per school year, that gives a repertoire of approximately 30 songs for each year that the individual student participated in the show. Using the averaged figures from the totals generated above, this would suggest that a student could expect to encounter 22.8 (rounded up to 23) songs originating within world folk traditions, of which 12.43 (rounding down to 12) originated within the traditions of the British Isles. Even with these rough estimates, this would imply that any child participating in the show for a single year would expect to have learned approximately 12 British and Irish folk songs during that period. The show ran from 1939 until 1997, meaning that for 58 years, a new cohort of primary school aged children would learn a not inconsiderable personal repertoire of folk songs averaging twelve such songs each year.

Of course, all of the children participating during the same school year would have learned the same repertoire, so there is none of the personal variation that would be hoped for in the individual repertoire of a folk singer. However, the impact of Singing Together is the closest that any organisation has come to realising Sharp’s cherished goal of bringing folk music participation into every school in the country. Whilst the level of participation would have been exactly as Sharp would have wished, the sheer quantity of children engaged led to what he would undoubtedly perceived as a commensurate lack of quality: his vaunted notions of authenticity were not upheld by the BBC’s more populist approach. Unfortunately for Sharp’s legacy, his ultimate aim of inspiring a new national school of composition would never have been achievable within this particular time frame, as he had failed to foresee a major obstacle to his dream; the art music in which his new composers were to have flourished had changed so drastically as to be almost unrecognisable, with successive waves of compositional approaches each radically altering the metamusical landscape: Schoenberg and his followers’ use of Serialism emerging in the late 1920s, Cage’s Indeterminacy following in the 1950s and Reich, Glass and Riley exploring Minimalism in the 1960s. By the time that Singing Together ceased broadcasting, the last bastion of the orchestral majesty beloved of Sharp was the Hollywood movie soundtrack: He would have recognised little else.

If Sharp’s dream, as unwittingly delivered by the BBC, had ultimately faltered, then what impact had Singing Together had on folk music’s role in the UK? With no hard figures to use as evidence, we are once again reduced to speculation. Some of the children of primary

137 school age who sang along to those early 1940s and 1950s broadcasts would have been the enthusiastic teenagers and early twenty-somethings who provided the enthusiasm and drive that powered the second, post-war folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. Is it beyond the realm of possibility to suggest a possible causal link? We know from Crook’s research that in 1942 there were 11,000 schools using that BBC broadcasts, and that this number represented over half of all schools in the UK at the time.197 Cox also tells us that 4,100 schools were known to be listening to Singing Together after a survey taken the previous year. Assuming that the total number of wartime schools was thus somewhere in between 20,000 and 22,000, Cox’s figure would suggest that approximately 1 in 5 British schools was using the show. With around twenty percent of schools having both folk song and musical participation central to their music practice at one point in the 1940s, the idea that this would not in any way contribute to a similar appetite for both singing and folk song in the lives of the same individuals a decade or so later would seem unlikely. The Archive on 4 segment mentioned above with Doc Rowe would suggest that, in his case at least, the repertoire learned in Primary school lead to teenage attendance of folk clubs.198

The documentary would go on to suggest a further link between leading current performers having participated in Singing Together in their childhoods. Prominent folk musicians (and erstwhile duo partners) and were both interviewed by Jarvis Cocker for the BBC Archive on 4 programme. Both women having been born in 1975, it is likely that they experienced the same musical content during their primary school years, albeit in different schools. Whilst both had grown up with parents actively involved in the folk scene, they recalled the show having had a formative influence on their early experiences of music making. Nancy Kerr recalled that her experience of the show had felt authentic and uninhibited, contrasting with the overly produced and polished music of the 1980s.

I remember it really vividly. I started Primary School in 1979, I think. I remember the turning on of the radio and the going and sitting in the reading corner and, yeah, listening to those songs together. To me that really was, it was a really earthy, rich experience and in some ways it kind of contrasted with, I think, the musical environment that was to come. And in fact the world environment that was to come. Like, the ‘80s was actually, in a lot of ways, musically made a step away from that sort of real and earthy thing, and music became like the world became, very kind of commercial. There was that move away from the real and the earthy and the guitar and the voice. And it got us at that really early stage where kids actually (watching my own kids) are not inhibited. Everyone could sing as far as my teachers were

197 Crook, 2007, 121. 198 Archive on 4. 138 concerned, and I think the show really helped that, I think it really encouraged that. It wasn’t about perfection, it was about getting it in your and singing it. (35:41)

When asked if any the songs she had learned from ‘Singing Together’ had entered her repertoire as an adult, she believed they had:

Yeah, I did learn songs. I’m pretty sure that the version of ‘Bushes and Briars’ that I’ve been singing now for donkeys years, I’m pretty sure I got that from a {Singing Together} pamphlet. You know, all these classics like ‘The Tree n the Wood’ and ‘Bingo’ and all that kind of thing, like really accessible folk songs. Brilliant.

Asked to describe her memories of the show, Eliza Carthy described how her primary school kept the radio on a dinner ladies trolley, and the teacher would wheel it in to the gym hall for the broadcasts; the gym equipment was cleared away for the occasion, and the children sat in a semicircle around the radio set with their booklets. Her experience of participating along with the show was not entirely positive: she recalled getting her legs slapped for singing the male voice parts, which her teachers considered too low for a girl, and clearly remembered negative feelings about the gym itself. The memory of the singing itself seemed positive, however. Having been born into a folk singing family and surrounded by English folk song since birth, she actually found that the show broadened her knowledge of other Anglophone musical traditions:

I suppose one of the things that folk music in schools did show you was sort of American songs. What have we got in here? {Presumably opens pamphlet during pause in audio}. ‘Old Mister Noah’, ‘Old Jo Clark’, you know. There’s a load of Scottish songs in here like ‘The Road to the Isles’. I wouldn’t have known songs like that.199

We can at least speculate that if some of the present folk scene’s most influential performers were exposed to and influenced by Singing Together in their formative years, then others may also have been. Unfortunately, speculation is as far as we can go without better listener figures to provide a basis for more definite analysis. The lack of audience data presents a frustrating barrier to creating an accurate account of the true impact of the show, but even with the conjectural figures used here to paint a picture of the potential reach, the database created for this research provides us with enough information to now regard the show as being of major significance for the teaching of folk music in UK schools, and to place the

199 Archive on 4 (00:36:37 to 00:36:48 approx.). 139 BBC into the picture as a key influence, working on a national level for over half a century with this show alone.

Concluding Thoughts: Wakefield and the BBC

Both Mary Wakefield’s competition festival and the BBC’s Singing Together and other music education broadcasts represented genuinely innovative approaches to music education, with folk music, and especially folk song, playing a key part in their success. Both demonstrate ways in which the two opposing sets of principles set out during the conflict between Sharp and Neal would find an outlet during the period between the two World Wars. This is not to suggest that either Wakefield or the BBC where actively seeking to emulate these precedents, or even that they were aware of them; rather, it serves to illustrate how viable ideas will resurface in new configurations if they still have an application. Unlike Sharp and Neal, neither the competition festival movement nor the BBC’s schools broadcasts came from a background of purist, traditional folk music practice, nor were they designed with an audience of musicians already embedded in traditional folk arts practice in mind; rather, they served as an accessible entry to folk music for the previously uninitiated.

Wakefield, in many ways a kindred spirit and contemporary of Mary Neal, had also come to believe that how her participants felt about their engagement with music was at least as important as the music they participated in making, if not more so. Wakefield, another early feminist from a well-to-do background, had also developed a similarly strong social conscience, and sought to do societal good through her education work. Whilst only seven years younger than Wakefield, Neal was to outlive her by thirty-four years: the fate of their respective legacies was to be quite the reverse. Neal’s Espérance activities were effectively curtailed by the outbreak of the First Word War, whilst the competition festivals were still a strong presence in the national music scene several decades later; whilst she had predeceased the Cambridgeshire Report by some twenty-three years, Wakefield’s legacy was held by the authoring committee of the report to be one of the great contemporary developments in 1930s music education, demonstrating a continuing presence and influence. Although it was Sharp’s vision that dominated schools use of folk music during the inter-war period, Wakefield’s competition festivals were one site in which an experiential focus, comparable to that of Neal,

140 still had sway, providing an extra-curricular or adult inroad both into music participation more broadly, and folk song in particular. Wakefield’s innovation was to expand the experiential focus outward to encompass her entire event with the concept of a carefully controlled over- arching atmosphere and ‘feel’; this way of thinking would later re-emerge in the way that Folkworks approached the framing of their events in the late 1980s and 1990s (see chapter 4, section 4.5 onwards).

Although the BBC’s music education initiative rose to prominence during the same period— it would have been technologically unfeasible even a decade earlier— the eventual lifespan of the radio’s tenure in Britain’s classrooms was to be far longer; Singing Together would be one of the last shows to linger on, surviving until the cusp of the new millennium. With the capacity for a single voice to lead a focused musical curriculum on a national scale, the extensive use of folk song (especially during the 1950s and early-to-mid 1960s) made the broadcast medium ideal for a continuation of the Sharpian ideal of top-down, expert lead music education on a massive scale. With much of the early folk material coming from Sharp’s own publications, and with so many schools being in a position to access the free-at- point-of-service broadcasts (all they needed was a working wireless), it seems likely that Sharp would have approved of the impact of the show’s earlier years. Whether he would have maintained such approval once later shows positioned British folk as a part of a wider context of world musics seems much less likely. Singing Together was not designed or produced as a mouthpiece for Sharpian orthodoxy, however, and the lack of adherence to strict aesthetic principles was to ultimately protect the show from becoming obsolete as it entered the third and fourth decades of its run. Although the BBC was somewhat slow to react, the fact that Singing Together (under later producer Douglas Coombes) was able to adapt to changes in the way folk music was both perceived and portrayed during the post-war revival allowed for elements of this legacy to survive, and to do so long after Sharp’s approach had fallen from favour in mainstream classroom music education (see chapter 3 for details of the changes in conceptions of folk music).

141 Chapter 3. Folk Music Education in the Postwar-Revival

The path of formal literature is from page to reader. The path of folk song is from performer to performer.1 A. L Lloyd.

The post-war revival and its surrounding social and political context has received considerable attention in academic circles: most recently Brocken’s perspective from the context of popular music studies in 2002,2 and Cohen & Donaldson’s analysis of the US and UK revivals as an interlinked, transatlantic phenomenon in 2014.3 With such a wealth of material already available, the following summary of important events, groups and individuals, and of significant movements and their ideologies, can be reasonably brief and generalised before the more detailed examination of the specific ramifications for institutionalised folk music education. The following summary will focus on establishing the changes in the way folk music was conceptualised, theorised and represented during the second revival: the political underpinnings of the newly energised revival movement post war, the founding of the first folk clubs, the rise of the professional folk singer, the interactions with popular music, and the influence of recording and broadcast technology all fed into the way folk education was to develop in the second revival.

3.1 Post-war Revival: Ideas and Influences

The influence of leftwing political movements on the post-war revival was to be profound. The Communist Party Of Great Britain (CPOBG) formed in 1920, but membership numbers were unstable before gaining unprecedented ground during WW2; at the end of the war, membership numbers were twice as high as they had been in any period during the interwar years, due in part to support of the Russian campaign against Nazi Germany.4 One of the outlets through which communist views in the UK were expressed was song. Organisations such as leftist Co-Op choirs had formed to sing anti-fascist anthems during the war, and the CPOGB’s own cultural arm—the Worker’s Music Association or WMA—had begun organising and promoting a series of benefit concerts for causes to which the party was

1 A. L. Lloyd, ‘The Meaning of Folk Song’, in Robert Leach & Roy Palmer (eds.), Folk Music in School (Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 5. 2 Michael Brocken, British Folk Revival: 1944–2002 (Abingdon: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2013). 3 Ronald Cohen, & Rachel Donaldson, Roots of the revival:American and British folk music in the 1950s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014). 4 Andrew Thorpe, ‘The Membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1920–1945’, The Historical Journal, 43 (2000), 777-800. 142 aligned.5 They had also begun publishing a series of affordable booklets setting out the party position on arts and cultural matters during the latter war years. It was in this series that A L Lloyd’s The Singing Englishman was first published in 1944.6 Lloyd, himself a long time member of the CPOGB, used the book to set out a new socio-political view of the origins of English folk song, arguing that it was a music born of political strife and revolutionary social upheaval dating back to the late middle ages; the romanticised peasant folk of the pre-war vision had been conceptually replaced by a Marxist framing: the folk and the proletariat were one and the same.7 Folk culture was presented, not as an expression of an illiterate peasantry, but rather as an alternative oral culture to that of the literate (i.e. academic) populace. By tying the identity of the folk into a contemporary continuum, with the folk song envisioned as a prior musical expression of the ongoing struggles of the labour movement, Lloyd presaged a very different view from the idea of folk music as a ‘closed account’ which had been prevalent before: if the folk themselves were still present, embodied in the urban working class, then folk music was a present concern, and the figurative account was very much open for business. This was a considerable departure in the way folk music was conceived, and had a number of ramifications for the development of the movement.

Firstly, as another tool in the greater struggle of the working class, folk song was there to do a job and further a wider political agenda. To that end, folk song could be edited and refashioned in order to better accomplish the cultural work it was being used to accomplish; the song texts could be altered, amended or even entirely rewritten if it was perceived to be necessary. This practice became commonplace relatively quickly; indeed, Lloyd himself was later criticised for the degree of unacknowledged text alteration occurring under his editorship. The well known song ‘The Recruited Collier’, presented as being from in his collection of North East mining songs Come All Ye Bold Miners, was almost entirely rewritten: it had actually been collected in Cumbria as a song about a farmer forced in to military service.8 He justified alterations to texts in his later printed collections as being in line with traditional practice, whilst always playing down the scale of revisions he enacted:

5 Brocken, 2013, 20. 6 Cohen & Donaldson, 2014. NB the authors assert the publication date was in 1942, but every other source I have discovered gives 1944 as the year of issue. Since I can find no evidence for the earlier date, I have given the latter here. 7 E. David Gregory, ‘Starting Over: A.L. Lloyd and the Search for a New Folk Music, 1945-49’, Canadian Journal for Traditional Music, 27 (1999/2000), NB: no page numbers available due to e-publishing. 8 A. L. Lloyd, Come All Ye Bold Miners: Ballads and Songs of the Coalfields (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1978), 114. See also critique in Gregory 1999/2000. Other examples include the rewriting of the melody of ‘the Lovers Ghost’ in the Penguin Book of Folk Songs. When compared to extant recordings of the source singer, Cecilia Costello of Birmingham, the tonal centre has been moved, changing the modal nature of the tune, the range and resolution. 143

Most of the poems quoted in this book are given as taken down from the singing of individual singers and unedited, but in one or two cases, where there exists a whole cycle of ballads dealing with a single subject or figure, a composite version has been made, put together from several texts, in - order to give the ballad a greater continuity or a higher dramatic interest ... Singers of these ballads are always incorporating new or alternative verses into them, and that is all that has been done in this case. I make no apology for doing so.9

Another new concept was the idea that an urban workforce, now seen as the spiritual legatees of folk song, may still have a wealth of tradition and folklore of their own, or at the very least, would be welcoming of having such things re-introduced into their lives. The repertoires of industrial and of the 19th century could be employed to create a continuity of relevance to the present, and thus there was a drive to gather material of that nature, either from printed sources or oral tradition. Lloyd’s Come All Ye Bold Miners was an influential early example in 1952, following closely by Ewan MacColl’s The Shuttle And The Cage: Industrial Folk Ballads, published by the WMA in 1954. Industrial folk-song, an intrinsically oxymoronic conception in the view of pre-war collectors, was now established as a viable and vibrant addition to the extant folk repertoire. Other collections were to follow over the next two decades, with the 1970s seeing a large number of new books; collectors and compilers such as Roy Palmer (Songs of the Midlands, 1972, The Painful Plough, 1972, Poverty Knock, 1974, Touch on the Times, 1974,), Jon Raven (Victoria’s Inferno, 1978, Black Country Songs and Rhymes, 1979), and (The Cruel Wars, 1972) publishing collections of thematically linked material, whether by region, trade or era.10 This had been a key motivation for A L Lloyd when writing The Singing Englishman, (later reworked as the seminal Folk Song In England). As Gregory summarised:

{Lloyd} now believed that English folk music could be reinvigorated, if one could find (or write) folk-songs that spoke to Britain’s urban workforce. The key to the future, he believed, lay in reviving the 19th century tradition of industrial, occupational and political songs, and in developing this tradition further. In doing so one should learn from W. C. Handy and George Gershwin: keep it simple, make it catchy, and, above all, stay in tune with the times. The result would be the creation of a new kind of urban folk-song akin to that already existing in North America.11

9 Gregory, 1999/2000. 10 Whilst Palmer’s exhaustive and prolific scholarship is mostly exemplary, it is occasionally weakened by unsupported assertions gained from the other notable Black Country collectors: the Raven brothers. Their work, mostly on the folklore and industrial song of their native , is characterized by unacknowledged text alterations, tunes “constructed from traditional elements” and mysteriously “missing” or “forgotten” sources. Of all the highly mediated postwar collections, it is those of the Raven’s that present the most cavalier attitude to fact, and their mention here should not be seen as any kind of endorsement of their work, but merely an acknowledgement of its existence. 11 Gregory, 1999/2000. 144

These two developments, the ideas that folk music was a living tradition that could have a bearing on contemporary society, and that older material could be refashioned to suit this purpose, led on to the most radical departure from pre-war folk song conceptualisation; if a situation arose, calling for a song, and for which an existing example could not be found or reworked, then a folk singer could simply write a new song in the folk idiom. Folk song was now conceived of as a living tradition, which its inheritors could contribute to, adding a voice from their own times to the continuum of stories left to them by song-makers of the past. The essence of a living tradition is that it responds, adapts and speaks to the present. For the first time since Herder, folk music, song and dance was seen to have an active present and potential future, as well providing a living link to the past. Writers such as , and Ewan MacColl would go on to write tradition anew, adapting the vernacular to suit the stories they wished to tell, and creating a repertoire of songs that reflected the cold-war Britain in which they lived. The Radio Ballads, a BBC radio commission written by Ewan MacColl and produced by Charles Parker with as director of music, perfectly encapsulate this new approach. An innovative approach to the audio documentary format, the eight programme series was broadcast between 1958 and 1964, with each radio ballad highlighting a particular social issue: herring fishermen, striking miners, travelling people, polio victims. The documentaries featured the actual voices of their subjects, rather than using actors to recreate the dialog, and MacColl wrote bespoke songs based closely on the idiomatic speech of the interviewees, using their own words to tell their stories in song.12

Cohen and Donaldson have rightly asserted that the British post-war folk revival of the late 1940s and onwards was deeply intertwined with the similar revival which had begun slightly earlier in the USA; in fact the American movement, unhindered by a protracted land war on home soil during the 1940s, had made significantly greater inroads into popular culture, with groups such as enjoying considerable commercial success. The arrival of several notable self-exiled American performers in Britain during the 1950s was to both strengthen the ties between the two revival movements, and to provide inspiration to their British counterparts. Also driven by left-leaning politics, the US folk song movement had been just one of the target groups of artists and musicians to come under increasingly paranoid government scrutiny during and after the war; they were suspected of ‘Un-American’

12 At the time of writing, all eight of the original Radio Ballads (now out of copyright) can be accessed via the BBC Radio 2 website here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/radioballads/original/ 145 activities, and chief amongst these supposed offences was the harbouring of communist sympathies. As Senator McCarthy’s 20th century witch-hunt grew in power and influence, there was an exodus of leftwing American performers to Europe, some of whom chose to wait out the political furore in the UK. Coincidently, as post-war Britain’s economy began to recover, so did the market for concert tours and recordings by American artists. These two factors combined to bring influential artists such as bluesman , Kentucky balladeer Jean Ritchie and folk singer and activist Peggy Seeger to the attention British audiences as never before.

Celebrated collector Alan Lomax was one such figure, leaving America for Europe to avoid scrutiny over his politics (he was listed as a ‘suspected subversive’ by the US authorities). Arriving in London in late 1950, he ultimately based himself there for the best part of the decade, despite his initial plans to collect in North Africa. Quickly forging links with both the EFDSS and the BBC, he was soon broadcasting a mixed repertoire of British and American folk song to a British audience which, in his own estimation, was comprised of approximately a million listeners.13 Whilst at the BBC, he was to make another influential contact: long time communist party member and recent convert to the cause of folk song, Ewan MacColl.14 MacColl was soon broadcasting his own BBC show: a six-part effort labeled ‘Ballads and Blues’, with each episode based around a thematic linking of the songs. Another platform for British and American traditional repertoire, it mixed recorded examples and live performances: MacColl, A L Lloyd and providing the voices for British material, with Big Bill Broonzy and Lomax amongst the American contributors. A loose core of performers, including MacColl, Cameron and Lloyd and also called Ballads and Blues, coalesced around the show and began to give concert performances, such as one in aid of the Daily Worker (the daily tabloid newspaper published by the British Communist Party) in 1953.15 Some of the same singers were to establish a folk club, again using the name Ballads

13 Cohen & Donaldson, 2014, 42 - 43. 14 Much is made of MacColl’s supposedly disingenuous name change. He was born Jimmy Miller, into a Scottish Community in , near Manchester. He was keen to assert his Scottish-ness throughout his life, and sometimes claimed to have been born in Scotland. The name change only marginally preceded his active participation in folk music, although it may have had to do with the fact that he had to lay low after deserting from the army. Regardless of the impetus, Jimmy Miller was a theatre man— both playwright and actor—and Ewan MacColl became the character he felt he needed to adopt in order to further his work with folk music. Adopting a pseudonym is relatively common practice amongst authors, actors, singers and , and yet their work is not routinely dismissed on that basis alone. MacColl’s record is far from spotless, personally or professionally, but the significance retrospectively attached to his choice to live under a name other than the one he was christened with is disproportionate to its contemporary impact. 15 Cohen & Donaldson 2014, 45. NB: The Daily Worker was rebranded as the Morning Star in 1966, and is still published in hard copy and online forms, albeit with no Sunday edition at present. 146 and Blues, in the same year; it was the first of its kind in the UK, and the model on which the many others that sprang up in its wake were based.

By the end of the decade folk clubs were not confined to the greater London area, with in most major cities in the UK having at least one example to call their own: from The Bridge Folk & Ballad Club in Newcastle, to Bradford’s Topic Folk Club and the Folksingers Club in Swindon, these clubs were a national phenomenon.16 The rate of expansion was unprecedented: according to EFDSS estimates quoted by Brocken, by the mid 1970s there were approximately three hundred folk clubs in the UK, a number which had grown to around four times as many again a decade later.17 These were new, dedicated forums for folk song enthusiasts, away from the parlours and concert halls of the first revival, allowing a degree of autonomy for the movement. As national network of clubs allowed for a touring circuit to develop, so with it came the professional folk singer: previously this had been a career only possible in North America.18 Folk dance had also its own dedicated events, in the form of folk dance festivals; the first international folk dance festival had been run by the EFDSS in London in 1930, and a regular annual event was established in 1955, in the seaside town of Sidmouth, Devon.19 The revival movement was not only expanding, but doing so through its own self-generated means, giving it a level of autonomy from mainstream popular music. Over time, this lead to the folk ‘scene’ as a subcultural phenomenon being all but synonymous with the folk clubs themselves, and the autonomy that had granted them such rapid growth began to tend toward an inward-looking isolationism.20

Folk music was not the only genre which saw an unprecedented post-war expansion in Britain however, and nor was it the first. Centred around London’s 100 Club, a surge in interest in trad jazz and blues, spearheaded by the musicians such as Chris Barber, Ken Colyer, Humphrey Littleton and (slightly later) Acker Bilk, had led to the development of a home- grown jazz scene; the American music they emulated, arriving with US forces via recordings, films, touring big bands and radio broadcasts, had taken hold in Britain during the latter years of WW2. It should be noted that this was a different movement from the distinctly European

16 The three clubs mentioned were chosen because they still exist, unlike the London Ballads and Blues club that predated them (defunct since 1993), and all three have at one time laid claim to being the oldest surviving example (of which the Topic’s claim seems most plausible). 17 Brocken, 2002, 114. 18 Niall MacKinnon, British Folk Scene: Musical Performance and Social Identity (Open University Press, 1993), 70-73. 19 Derek Schofield, The First Week In August - Fifty Years Of The Sidmouth Festival (Sidmouth International Festival Ltd, 2004) NB: The festival, now called Sidmouth Folk Week, still runs, although not to the size and scale it reached at its heyday in the mid 1990s during the tenure of the Mrs Casey Music agency. 20 Brocken, 2002, 124. 147 ‘gypsy’ jazz pioneered by Reinhardt and Grappelli in the mid 1930s, which the occupation of France had temporarily driven underground. In fact, the musical interests of this new scene were somewhat fragmented, with some preferring pure New Orleans jazz, some focusing on various forms of blues and others still following music and Skiffle.

It was this latter form which was to start an unexpected musical craze in Britain, after the surprising mainstream success of what had previously been a niche musical form aimed at jazz enthusiasts: the Lonnie Donnegan Skiffle Group’s ‘’—a cover of a prison song collected in Arkansas in the 1930s by John Lomax, later made popular by Leadbelly—entered the British charts in January 1956, and stayed there for 6 months.21 Donnegan, banjo player with the Chris Barber Jazz Band, seems to have been taken as much by surprise as the record industry: earlier skiffle recordings by Barber and Colyer on the Decca label had sold well, but failed to make a mark beyond the usual jazz audience.22 In truth, fortuitous timing had played its part, as ‘Rock Island Line’, with its wildness and energy (for the times), was a suitable home-grown foil to the American rock ‘n’ roll craze that had arrived with Bill Haley and the Comets at the same time the previous year. In emulation, skiffle bands sprang up countrywide, and for the next two years (before the national enthusiasm waned) the sound of washboards and tea-chest basses was heard in coffee shops, skiffle clubs and even skiffle competitions.23

For the fledgling post war folk revival, skiffle laid two very important foundations. Firstly, unlike jazz or even rock and roll, it was music young people could make for themselves, with little to no prior musical training needed: a genuinely do-it-yourself musical phenomenon.24 The fact that skiffle was much cheaper to join in with, when compared with other contemporary popular musics, also played a significant part, as it opened participation up to anyone with sufficient enthusiasm to put together their own ramshackle instrument; a contemporary critic described the line-up of the average skiffle group as a lead singer/guitarist, backed by a group whose various instruments were ‘anything you like, so long as it looked as if it had been assembled on a rubbish dump’25. The second important precedent set by the skiffle boom was that it created an appetite for musical participation—as opposed to the role of consumers of music—amongst young people in an urban environment. Furthermore, it did so regardless of class and educational background, and without requiring a

21 Brocken, 2002, 72. 22 Idem. 23 MacKinnon, 1993, 23-24. 24 Idem. 25 MacKinnon, 1993, 24 (quote from Gersh). 148 certain level of disposable income: factors that could have been barriers to participation in prior popular musics. In essence, after the skiffle boom, there was a real demand for music that people could do.

Skiffle was the first real homegrown guitar music craze that Britain could boast, but it was still based on American repertoire, which was gleaned from American records. As the folk scene and skiffle boom collided, there was an increasing backlash against ‘American imitators’: those singing in pseudo-southern accents about places and practices that few British performers would have had the opportunity to experience, having originated on the far side of the Atlantic.26 Whilst partly based on a mistrust of perceived in-authenticity, there was also a wider sense of cultural incursion at play. Rock and roll records and Hollywood movies glamourised and idealised US teen culture as the 1950s progressed: the teenager was a distinctly post-war concept. As Lloyd later opined, part of the opposition to skiffle came from: ‘…an anxiety after the Second World War, an anxiety that showed itself around 1950, not to be swamped by American culture, but to put up a defence for British culture’.27 As the skiffle craze abated, the folk scene proved an ideal channel for those looking to continue making music for themselves, especially appealing to those seeking a greater sense of authenticity. One survivor of the exodus from skiffle was the acoustic guitar; in the hands of innovators like Davy Graham, , and , an instrument that had previously been seen as an American affectation began to establish a permanent place in the soundscape of the UK folk scene. The rapidity of the guitar’s integration was helped in no small part by the recording industry, which afforded a relatively small group of pioneering guitarists national influence.

3.2 Records: The (R)evolving Tradition

Recording technology had been in its infancy during the initial, pre-war collection period, and had little impact as a result. With the notable exception of the eccentric Australian collector Percy Grainger, the phonograph had not been considered a useful collecting tool, partially because the results would not be of use to the buying public of the time without editing and printing with piano accompaniment; the songs would still need written mediation, and thus the phonograph simply introduced another step into the collecting process with no resultant gain. The succession of new record formats emerging throughout the late 1940s made longer

26 MacKinnon, 1993, 26-27. 27 Mark Gregory, ‘A. L. Lloyd Interviewed: Folk songs, Industrial Songs, the Folk Revival and other Musics’, Mustrad, http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/lloyd.htm, 2009 (07/03/2016). 149 records than the 10” and 12” singles formats a viable commercial proposition, with the Long Playing 45 making the concept of an of songs possible for the first time. For folk song collectors, this presented the first genuine alternative to printed song collections, as a group of songs could be now be issued as an audible collection on a single disc. Aside from the commercial considerations the new format offered, this raised the question of whether aural transmission via recording was more authentic than learning from printed resources. In the opinion of influential revivalists such as A L Lloyd, the answer was an unequivocal yes. Formerly sceptical of whether a genuine revival in England was possible, Gregory notes that Lloyd reversed his position, and in doing so made another major revision to the conceptualisation of folk song:

In saying {that recordings could be an authentic pathway for the oral tradition} Lloyd was proposing a radical reinterpretation of the Sharpean conception of a folk tradition. If radio broadcasts and 78rpm records were legitimate vehicles by which traditional song might be passed from generation to generation, then English folk music too might be re-invigorated in a way similar to the American revival.28

Records sales and radio airtime had both played pivotal roles in driving the impetus of the American revival, and the British market responded to a growing UK demand in similar fashion; with radio broadcast of folk music still largely dominated by the BBC, the main commercial opportunity lay in record manufacture and distribution. British gramophone manufacturers Decca established a in 1929, and rapidly became an international market leader; folk records were issued under the main label, but especially under specialist subsidiaries like Argo and Deram.29 Perhaps most significantly from the perspective of the revival’s legacy, Argo released six of MacColl, Seeger & Parker’s celebrated Radio Ballads as LP albums. , originally set up as the record marketing arm of the WMA (with all the inherent political overtones and agendas) developed a sizeable catalogue of traditional and revival recordings, notable for their extensive liner notes and detailed booklets accompanying their records; just as with the WMA, Topic saw at least part of its role as being educational, issuing education specific catalogues and pamphlets on the suggested use of their records in schools.30 Other independent labels specialising in folk, such as ’s Leader (traditional material) and Trailer (revival singers) labels, Scotland’s Tangent and Ireland’s Outlet, as well as American imports from the likes of Folkways and Riverside all had sizeable specialist catalogues catering to the record buying folk music enthusiast.

28 Gregory, 1999/2000. 29Michael Grosvenor Myer, ‘Resources’, in Robert Leach & Roy Palmer (eds.), Folk Music in School (Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 152-153. 30 Grosvenor Myer, in Leach & Palmer, 1978, 153-154. 150 Although the major labels played a significant role in the market, the number of independent labels meant that folk music was often being recorded by and for enthusiasts: as with the folk clubs for performance, with recordings the movement was willing and able to perpetuate itself.

As the revival progressed, in tandem with the hippy and psychedelic turn of popular culture in late 1960s and early 1970s, the notion of modifying folk song to maintain relevance to the times opened the conceptual door to more varied accompaniments and stylistic fusions. The 1964 Decca release of Folk Roots, New Routes by singer and maverick guitarist lived up to its name; the blend of English and American folk song with Graham’s blues, jazz and North African influences created a trend for more detailed and daring accompaniments amongst the LP’s devotees. More fusions with non-traditional genres were to follow during the later 1960s, as the quintet Pentangle (featuring both Jansch and Renbourn on guitar) explored the space between folk and jazz (1967). The folk rock movement, spearheaded by bands such as (first album 1967), (first record 1971) and later the various lineups of fused contemporary rock influences and instrumentation with traditional material; ’s controversial ‘going electric’ at the 1965 (and the subsequent backlash from traditionalists) had already instigated an early form of electric folk in the USA.31 The trappings of flower power and the hippy movement in the mid 1960s provided a platform for artists such as Marrianne Faithful and to fuse pop and folk, gaining both radio airplay and chart success.32 Folk music was entering the mainstream, but the mainstream was making similar inroads into folk.

3.3 The Critic’s Group

The arrival of electric folk did not go unopposed within the British folk scene; just as Bob Dylan’s conversion to an electric band had seen him heckled as ‘Judas’ in the USA, influential figures within the British second revival saw the adoption of the popular music’s trappings and traits as an inherent betrayal of the movement. Another area of contention was that the adopted Americanisms and have-a-go ethos of the skiffle movement were still present in the folk clubs. On a visit to Cecil Sharp House in 1964, American , activist and folk singer was surprised to find, even at the EFDSS headquarters, there were

31 Britta Sweers. Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music (Oxford: OUP, 2005). 32 Brocken, 2002, 81-84. 151 performers singing American material with adopted accents, rather than exploring their own traditions.33 By the mid 1960s, there was a growing sense that perhaps this DIY ethos had led to a decline in standards, with exuberance having taken the place of exactitude. MacColl and Seeger had already put a policy in place at the Holborn Ballads and Blues Folk Club stating that ‘if you were singing from the stage, you sang in a language you could speak and understand’: from that point on, the singer was to be a representative of their own culture, and sing songs within the appropriate ‘social and artistic parameters’ of their origin.34 Another stipulation was that resident singers could only sing any specific traditional song once within a three-month period. These practices were eagerly adopted by more traditionally minded folk clubs, and rejected by others, so that a schism between traditionalist and populists clubs gradually developed through the latter half of the 1960s, to the point where the two audiences were more or less mutually exclusive, and material acceptable at one could be heckled off stage at the other.35 The scene had developed a binary opposition, with each faction largely defining itself against the negative other, but there were attempts by practitioners to deepen their grasp of what folk music actually was, rather than simply dismissing what it was not: most notably for the development of the post-war revival, this desire lead to the inauguration of the Critic’s Group.

The Critics Group was formed in 1965 as a reaction to what MacColl and Seeger perceived as a prevailing lack of rigor in the performance, presentation and understanding of traditional song. Initially intended as a round table style discussion in which the invited singers could offer useful critique on each other’s performances, over time it became dominated by MacColl’s increasingly irascible temperament until its final acrimonious break up in 1971. Stylistic concerns were a major area of discussion; according to member Brian Pearson, ‘…part of what the group was trying to do was to see if it was possible to build up a set of criteria that made sense for the interpretation of folk songs’. To this end, MacColl introduced theoretical frameworks to the discussions, attempting to codify approaches to the interpretation of folk song by drawing on elements of the dramatic techniques of the Stanislavski system in order to facilitate believable characterisation, and notions from Laban’s movement analysis in trying to capture and incorporate effort and intention in the singing.36 Essentially, the singer should place themselves in the mind frame of the songs narrator in

33 MacKinnon, 1993, 26. 34 Peggy Seeger, undated (probably around 2000 from context) open letter to the Editor of ‘Living Tradition’, archived here: http://www.folkmusic.net/htmfiles/edtxt39.htm. 35 MacKinnon, 1993, 28. 36 ‘How Folk Songs Should Be Sung’, Culture Wise Production, BBC Radio 4, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b018wy4j, 07/01/2012 (23/10/17). 152 order to properly characterize the their performance. In the words of another member, Richard Snell:

Method acting, you know? You actually tried to have yourself think like the character and feel like the character, so when you went on stage you were the character, and then everything else would follow: the gestures, the movements, and everything else would follow from that.37

Theatrical technique and theory was an area in which MacColl was well versed, through his prior work in radical street theatre, ballad opera and radio drama. His first wife had been the radical director , and they had spent much of the 1930s running an experimental communist theatre group called Theatre Union, regrouping after the war with some of the same members to form . This period of his work, since compared to Brechtian notions of epic theatre and Russian agitprop, was to profoundly influence his approach to the performance of folk music, and the critics group was the site of his most theorized and focused expression of this.38 According to his autobiography, they had also introduced vocal training exercises and warm up techniques as well as exercises aimed relaxation, interval recognition and articulation.39 For MacColl and his adherents, folk singing was a craft and, like a craftsman, the necessary skills could only be learned through hard work over a considerable period of time; a touring revival singer was, in MacColl’s estimation, called upon to sing more frequently and for longer periods than any traditional singer would have been, so an athlete’s approach to regular, structured training was crucial.40 Sessions were run in which the style, tone, inflection and even the accent of a specific source singer would be dissected by the group in an attempt to get at the essence of what made folk song what it was. The analogy drawn by MacColl in the autobiography is likening a singer from another discipline attempting folk music to an instrumentalist in the same position: ‘Violinists who want to become fiddlers have to do the same thing. The bowing is different, the way of holding the fiddle, the impulse given, and so on’.

The group’s sudden dissolution—of which accounts vary, but seemingly matters came to an irreconcilable head after a highly pressurised, twenty eight day run of one of the group’s theatrical ventures—put an instant end to their activities as a collective, but the legacy of

37 ‘How Folk Songs Should Be Sung’ BBC Radio 4, 2012. 38 Michal Verrier, ‘Folk club or Epic Theatre: Brecht’s influence on the Performance Practice of Ewan MacColl’, in Ian Russell & David Atkinson (eds.), Folk Song: Tradition, Revival, and Re-Creation (Aberdeen: Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen, 2004), 109-113. 39 MacColl, Ewan, Journeyman (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1990), 305 -310. 40 MacColl, 1990, 305 -306. 153 thought lived on through the members’ individual work in the decades to come. Crucially, MacColl, Seeger and the Critic’s Group had introduced some radical ideas into the wider discussion about folk repertoire and performance. Perhaps the most influential of these was the idea that folk music was something that could, and should, be worked on in order to refine and deepen the performance. This was part of a duty of respect to the music itself, and to the culture it represented; the music was still open to performance by anyone, but this did not mean that all interpretations were equally valid, authentic and truthful. Folk music may not be art music, but the Critic’s Group showed that folk performance need not be artless.

3.4 Folk Music in Schools

All of these developments in post-war revivalist thinking were ultimately to filter into the way folk music was taught in schools by the mid 1970s. The new vision was of folk song that could change as the people did, and be remembered, revised, or even made wholly anew to suit the needs of its current users. Recordings gave access to voices of traditional singers as never before, new songwriting and fusions with popular musics made folk song relevant to subsequent generations, and the possibility of participation for all made it more accessible than ever. Despite this, the pre-war impulse to get folk song into schools was not initially shared by post-war revivalists; indeed, it was precisely the ‘school version’ of folk song that was held as the antithesis of what folk music could and should be.41 Despite the changes in perception amongst the new generation of folk song enthusiasts, the Ministry of Education still placed much store in the Sharpean model, advocating the older methodology throughout the late 1950s and into the early 1960s, especially for junior and middle schools. 42 Sharp was still looked up to as the ultimate authority on ‘the riches of native folk-song’, although the 1905 controversy over folk versus national song had still not been entirely resolved.43 Much of Sharp’s schools material was still available for those wishing to use folk song in their music lessons, and there was little impetus to publish new titles for use by school children: folk song was now seen as a serious, adult concern.44 However, as some of those who had been excited by folk song as teenagers in the 1950s and 1960s grew up, ‘cut their hair and got

41 Leach & Palmer, 1978, 1. 42 Anon, Music In Schools (Ministry of Education Pamphlet no. 27) (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1956), 4-8. Republished unaltered in 1960. A facsimile can be found online here: http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/musicinschools/musicinschools.html, (23/10/17). 43 Anon, Music In Schools, 1956, 28. 44 Roy Palmer had in fact previously published two songbooks with the Cambridge University Press which were aimed at the schools market—Room for Company (1971) and Love is Pleasing (1974)—using the older style with piano parts, but these were the exceptions to the rule: they are the only two post war publications in that style mentioned in Folk Song in Schools, for instance, and both notably contain songs mostly from manuscript rather than oral sources. 154 a proper job’ in the teaching profession, there was a slow and steady change from the old guard to the new, and the tenets of the second revival took hold in schools. Significantly, this involved a wholesale rejection of Sharpean orthodoxy, and a return to values that were far more akin to the Nealite approach of the earlier revival.

1978’s Folk Music In School, edited by Robert Leach and Roy Palmer, is an excellent touchstone for this about-face in teacher’s attitudes, for a number of reasons. Firstly, the post- war revival was now well into its second generation, having had over two decades to for its impact to take hold. Much material had been collected, published and re-entered the wider oral tradition through folk clubs and recordings in that time: enough time for a degree of stability in pedagogical thought to have arisen. Secondly, it was largely written by practicing educationalists. Of the books twelve contributors, ten were either current or former education professionals, working either as teachers in primary or secondary schools, or lecturing in higher education.45 The editors themselves were both experienced schoolteachers; at the time of writing, Palmer was headmaster at The Dame Cadbury School in Birmingham, whilst Leach had moved on to lecture in drama at Birmingham University. The two remaining writers were equally worthy authorities. A. L. Lloyd’s biography in the introduction billed him (probably rightly) as ‘the doyen of folk-music scholarship in this country’, citing his credentials as an ethnomusicologist, performer and broadcaster of note. had been an active member of MacColl and Seeger’s Critics Group and had qualified as a teacher, although by the late seventies she was best known as a performer, BBC radio broadcaster (especially in school’s music broadcasts) and the voice of the rag doll Madeleine in the Postgate & Firmin’s children’s television show Bagpuss.46

It should be stressed that this return to what I have chosen to retrospectively designate as Nealite values was not necessarily inspired by the work of the Esperance Club or Mary Neal herself. In the late 1970s, research into Neal’s life and work was very limited, and what little had been done (mainly by Margaret Dean-Smith and Roy Dommet) was not publicly disseminated.47 Even during their heyday between 1907 and 1914, in contrast to Sharp and the later efforts of the EFDSS, the Esperance Club’s educational publications had been sparse: limited to the two volumes of The Esperance Morris Book. Since the demise of the Guild at the end of the First World War, Esperance club publications had been out of print, although there had been a limited reprint of Kidson & Neal’s ‘English Folk Dance and Song’ by EP

45 Leach & Palmer, 1978, iv-v 46 Kerr was also responsible for the show’s music. 47 Judge, 1989, 545-546. 155 Publishing in 1972.48 No reference at all is made to Neal or the Guild anywhere in the main text of book, although the Robert Leach’s chapter on using folk music and dance in the drama lesson lists the Kidson & Neal book under suggested further reading, albeit alongside twelve of Sharp’s publications.49 In fact, the book dedicates only two and a half pages to folk dance as an addendum to Leach’s chapter, but there is a definite Nealite bent to the suggestions present; Leach argues that ‘entering the spirit of the dance with gusto’, inventing their own steps as needed is a more fitting approach than executing ‘intricate steps with total accuracy’.50

Beyond the few clues present in Leach’s chapter, there is no reason to suppose that Mary Neal provided direct inspiration for the combined pedagogical standpoint of the book’s contributors. Rather, it shows a reaction; a pendulum swing away from the polarised pedagogical position Sharp had taken in direct opposition to Neal over half a century earlier, a swing back towards values that Neal would have recognised as her own even she had not provided the direct impetus. The rigid orthodoxy of Sharp’s approach, unable to adapt to changes in society, schools or students, had rendered itself near-obsolete years since: a fact ruefully acknowledged by Leach and Palmer in their forward:

It is fashionable to deride this movement {i.e. Sharp/EFDSS’s historical approach} now: the texts were often bowdlerized and the songs banged out to universal piano accompaniment, and they were presented with a curious detachment, as though they had no connection with life. … A more serious reservation is that the material was almost exclusively rural…51

Leach and Palmer credit the revitalised return of folk song to schools as one of the great achievements of the postwar revival. A greater freedom with both the texts used and the subject matters they covered were contributing factors; with the boundaries of what was considered to be folk music having become more relaxed, industrial and urban song, contemporary songs in traditional style, sources and even the fringes of the Music Hall repertoire had all allowed for a more relevant and tailored approach to the individual school environment. With the focus having shifted toward the song-as- communication, the text of the songs was to be given primacy, even if this were at the expense of the aesthetic considerations of the melody. In particular, Leach and Palmer were keen to stress the benefits of local and regional vernacular language in a classroom setting. A

48 Kidson & Neal, 1915. 49 Leach, in Leach & Palmer, 1978, 133. 50 Ibid, 132-133. 51 Ibid, 1. 156 similar broadening of the array of musical instruments used to accompany and augment the music had also allowed for song to take place in classroom settings without a piano present, and opened the role of accompanist to both teachers and pupils without the advantage of a background in formal musical training: the have-a-go ethos of the revivalists had finally permeated the education sector, and with it the affordable, portable and increasingly ubiquitous acoustic guitar.

A close reading of the book’s nine chapters shows a near complete reversal of pedagogical thought when compared to the tenets of the Sharpian legacy. Rather than a chapter-by-chapter breakdown, an assessment of the common themes running through the different author’s contributions will follow, as this better illustrates the diverse contexts in which these themes are employed.

Throughout the book, the resources recommended by the contributors are mostly from second revival folk singers, with MacColl, Seeger and Lloyd featuring prominently throughout. Significantly, recordings take precedence over written resources. Whilst the aforementioned paucity of post-war schools-specific material will almost certainly have had an impact in this regard, the overall focus had shifted; aural learning, even as mediated by the recording industry, was now seen as the way folk music should be transmitted.

3.4.1 Suitability

Why should folk music be taught in schools? What, if anything, could folk music do for the pupils that any other form of music could not? Many of the contributing authors attempted to answer questions of what made folk music a relevant and useful educational tool in their own professional experience, each responding slightly differently due to the age groups and subject areas they taught. Before addressing what folk could be utilised for, however, they needed to explain what they believed to fall within the bounds of folk music: the definitions they variously arrived at were both broad and nuanced. Especially noteworthy was the acceptance of folk music’s permeability with regards to areas of crossover with other repertoires. Writing from the perspective of a primary school teacher, Michael Pollard expressed his personal interpretation as follows:

157 For educational purposes, at least, the definition of folk music can be fairly tolerant, and it shades off at the edges into clearly different, but related material such as children’s skipping games and counting-out rhymes, early music-hall songs and Sharp’s ‘vulgar street songs’ of the turn of the {20th} century, brass-band music and even non-conformist hymnody.52

What Pollard’s definition demonstrates is that the function of folk song is of greater relevance than its provenance, with music suitable for community or group use (brass-band, hymn singing and games) being of particular value. Similarly, when defining what should be considered folk music within the drama lesson, Geoffrey Summerfield makes a similar point of placing function first.

For my purpose, I choose to include under the category of folk song that which has worked its way into the oral tradition: So ‘Tipperary’ qualifies as a folk song.53 The purist shudders, alas; I have no wish to inflict gratuitous injury on him: He will simply have to go away and hug his virtue to his chest, while I browse through Denis Johnston’s ‘Nine Rivers from Jordan’ (surely ripe for reprinting?).54

Again the emphasis is on what the song can do, rather than where it came from; if a song has been selected by the singing public as being fit for their collective repertoire, than it fulfils the essential role of a folk song, even if it began life in the music hall. This is in stark contrast to Sharp’s views, wherein the vulgarity of the music hall was the absolute antithesis of the noble folk song. In Summerfield’s mocking of the purist, and his implication that the people’s choice supersedes that of the theorist, we also hear overtones of the Nealite anti-expert stance. As within the wider post-war revival, folk song is now there to serve the needs of those who make it, rather than a sacrosanct canon, to be aspired to but never altered.

The accessibility of folk material is a key theme throughout the book. The everyday nature of much of the subject matter is one of the reasons given: the relative simplicity of the language another. 19th century industrial song, the second revival’s most significant contribution the folk repertoire, is mentioned as having particular relevance to children in urban schools, as it deals with their own tangible heritage without recourse to the tropes of the rural idyll and peasant lifestyle so beloved of the pre-war collectors. Folk music is also presented as

52 Michael Pollard, ‘Folk Music in Junior and Middle Schools’, in Robert Leach & Roy Palmer (eds.), Folk Music in School (Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 35. 53 ‘It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary’, although often thought of as a quintessentially Irish song about longing to leave London for Ireland, was in fact written in the West Midlands by Jack Judge (a Midlander of Irish decent), with the song initially gaining fame in the Music Halls of the Manchester area. Adopted as a marching song by an Irish regiment in WW1, it gained international recognition soon after. 54 Geoffrey Summerfield, ‘Folk Song in the English Lesson’, in Robert Leach & Roy Palmer (eds.), Folk Music in School (Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, 1978, 73. 158 something of a level playing field; with its own aesthetic criteria (discussed under Interpretation, below) all of the students could all begin their journey into folk music from the same point, rather than granting advantage to those with access to private music tuition (all to often a matter determined simply by family income). Another factor that grants accessibility is the adaptability of the repertoire; the difficulty level of engagement with folk music can be easily scaled to suit the individual student or group in question, whether by age or ability. Simpler chorus songs, cumulative list building songs and skipping games are suitable for younger and less experienced learners, whilst Geoffrey Brace suggests projects such as analysis of melodic formulae, exploration of modes and scales used in folk and world musics, and the impact of folk music on the works of (mainly nationalist and romantic era) composers to tax the abilities of more advanced students.55

Folk music, in Brace’s view, also avoids some of the common pitfalls of classical and popular music in schools.56 As touched on above, the base level of musical training necessary for a meaningful practical, hands on engagement of actually making classical music would not be within financial reach of many schools, nor would the material itself necessarily fall within the cultural horizons of the student body; whilst broadening those horizons musically is a noble aim, maintaining student interest long enough to instill the theoretical and technical training necessary to successfully ‘bridge the gap’ is not necessarily easy. Conversely, an aspect of the folk repertoire that makes it a practical proposition for schools use is that, being outside of its own time, it sidesteps secondary school children’s fiercely partisan attitudes to contemporary popular music: attitudes often derived from lifestyle, fashion or other factors extrinsic to the melody and lyrics in question. , Brace argued, was also inherently out of place in the classroom: schools are not the setting in which the pupils’ passion for ‘their’ music is developed or sustained: the whole ambience is wrong. Whether listening to the radio in their bedrooms, forming bands in garages, dancing in clubs, collecting records, pouring over the music press or attending gigs and festivals, it was outside of the school gates that popular music soundtracked their lives and shaped their identities. Although distinct from both popular and art musics, several contributors were at pains to stress that folk was to be seen as their equal, having, in the words of Brace:

…its own disciplines, its own background of knowledge, its own academicism if you want it. Above all, it is accessible to the multitude emotionally, technically and

55 Geoffrey Brace, ‘Folk Music in the music Lesson’, in Robert Leach & Roy Palmer (eds.), Folk Music in School (Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 67. 56 Brace, in Leach & Palmer, 1978, 65-66. 159 financially in a way that no other branch of music is. That alone must recommend it to every poverty-stricken school in the country.57

3.4.2 Inspiration Beyond Music

The role that folk music could play in inspiring, enriching and informing other subjects within the curriculum is explored in some depth, with individual chapters devoted to its potential for use in English, History and Drama lessons. The contributions on how folk music could be used more broadly in junior and middle schools also make reference to folk song and dance as potential cross-curricular stimuli for creative writing, art or drama, using examples of songs with particularly strong narratives to inspire new work from the students. In this regard, Pollard suggests using songs to provide a storyline that could then be dramatised, perhaps resetting it into modern times, extending the story beyond the end point presented in the song, or re-telling it from the perspective of a different character: all of these suggestions treat folk song primarily as a vehicle for the text, rather than as a piece of stand-alone music. The storytelling aspect also lends itself to teaching Religious Education and Humanities, as themes such as social injustice, gender roles and political conflict provide a good jumping-off point for classroom discussion. As emphasized in Roy Palmer’s chapter on using folk song in the secondary school History lessons, Pollard is keen to stress the importance of local repertoire, with songs detailing historical trades, disputes, incidents and characters being especially useful in junior and middle school history, especially the kind of bottom-up, social history that stands in contrast to the ‘lists of kings and queens’ Victorian approach. 58 Again, folk song here is seen primarily as narrative, whether as an eyewitness account of history or as a useful allegory. Palmer’s chapter deals with more specific examples of how particular songs could fit into the history curriculum, although over half of his examples come from printed sources such as broadside ballads, libels and bill posters; many of these, as was the custom, do not even name the tune they should be sung to, let alone provide any kind of notation.59 Ballads and street songs collected from oral tradition are also featured, and Palmer does provide notation for the melodies where possible, but having been mediated over time by passing from generation to the next, those songs are not presented as having as much historical authority as contemporary printed sources. Regardless of their provenance, however, the story they can tell is of greater import than the tune to which they are sung.

57 Brace, in Leach & Palmer, 1978, 67. 58 Pollard, in Leach & Palmer 1978, 42-43. 59 Roy Palmer, ‘Folk Music in the Teaching of History’, in Robert Leach & Roy Palmer (eds.), Folk Music in School (Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 87-109. 160

Robert Leach’s chapter on folk music and dance in the drama lesson similarly focuses on folk song as a potentially rich seam of narrative which can be mined for inspiration; for Leach, folk songs are a way in to explorations of ‘social’ drama: of examining fundamental, archetypal relationship structures of daily life in dramatic form.60 Music has long held a place in the drama lesson, he argues, and needs no justification for its inclusion, yet folk music he felt to be underused in this regard; schools invariably asked their students to respond in movement to dramatic sounding romantic era orchestral works by the likes of Stravinsky or Mussorgsky instead. Whilst folk song and dance could be used to add both variation and verisimilitude to pre-existing dramatic works, Leach suggests that folk song can provide impetus for drama exercises in their own right. He gives the example of the traditional song ‘The Drylsden Wakes’, specifically a version recorded by Ewan MacColl, in which a husband and wife argue over the division of labour in their household and the relative hardships of each of their lives. As a ready-made dialogue, the song could easily be transformed into a short two-hander, with the addition of costumes and acting out of the words. Leach is drawing our attention to the drama already inherent in the song, which merely requires staging techniques to become a drama.

A particular methodological inspiration for Leach was Ewan MacColl and Charles Parker’s Radio Ballads, with particular reference to ‘Singing the Fishing’, a quasi-musical audio docu- drama dealing with the changing lives and livelihoods of British herring trawlermen from the 1890s until the 1960s. Weaving spoken word—not acted, but recorded directly from interviews with the real fishermen—with both traditional and bespoke song, the format sought to tell the story of its subject in their own words; MacColl’s specially written songs, such as ‘The Shoals o’ Herring’ for Singing The Fishing, were constructed from phrases spoken by the interview subjects themselves. Leach dedicates three pages to dissecting that particular Radio Ballad, and then goes on to show how he and his students had constructed a stage piece based on the closure of the Birmingham Fairs in the 1870s: the set was a series of fair stalls with which the audience could interact, as the actors were also the stall holders. Folk song, street cries and newly composed music were used as a lyrical binding agent, tying together the speeches by the actors and chorus to create a documentary play. Again, folk song is the medium by which a story is delivered, but here it also informs, interweaves, interjects and facilitates spoken dialogue, acting as a musical meta-narrative for the dramatic arc of the

60 Robert Leach, ‘Folk Music and Drama’, in Robert Leach & Roy Palmer (eds.), Folk Music in School (Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 110.

161 piece. Leach states a firm belief in the inseparability of folk song from acting, and cites the ritual drama of the Mumming Play as the tradition’s expression of this unity. 61 Traditionally, Mummers often perform a variation on a ‘resurrection play’ as found around Christmas time in the Cotswold villages of Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire: after a ‘calling on song’ to draw a crowd and introduce the players, one or more of the character archetypes—for example Saint George, Father Christmas, a Turkish Knight or Beelzebub—is slain in ‘hero combat’, before being miraculously revived by the Doctor.62 Leach could equally have used more southerly Plough Jacks or northern Pace Egging plays to illustrate his point.63 The Critic’s Group had already foregrounded this link to theatre in their theoretical approach during the previous decade, but Leach developed this notion still further for schools use.

3.4.3 Ownership and Agency

The issue of pupils taking possession of folk song looms large throughout Folk Song In Schools, and finds expression through several different avenues. Firstly, folk music is seen as a form of social communication and interaction, a musical sharing, far more about the performer(s) than the material. Illustrating this point, Cooke quotes an unnamed traditional singer as saying ‘It’s not so much the song you enjoy as the person’, placing the emphasis on the identity of the singer before their repertoire or performance ability.64 The starting point for enabling students to find a sense of ownership and agency within the folk repertoire is for staff to acknowledge that younger children have already inherited their own self-perpetuating lore and language, and that they did so in their break time: ‘the culture of the playground is a living, vibrant thing which teachers should not ignore’.65 According to Pollard, teachers should have a knowledge of the local playground traditions of the children themselves, as what the pupils choose to enact amongst themselves un-directed may well indicate the needs they expect the music lesson to satisfy. Particularly, the fact that children’s singing games almost always involve an area of movement, or at the very least do not prohibit it, can be telling. The implication is children’s own traditions indicate to teachers that their natural physical response to music should be developed and exploited in the classroom, which tallies

61 Leach, in Leach & Palmer 1978, 130. 62 R. J. Tiddy, The Mummer’s Play (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923). 63 Malcolm Taylor & Doc Rowe (eds.), Room, Room, Ladies and Gentlemen: An Introduction to the English Mummers' Play (EFDSS in association with the Folklore Society: London, 2002). 64 Peter Cooke, ‘Music Learning in Traditional Societies’, in Robert Leach & Roy Palmer (eds.), Folk Music in School (Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 29. 65 Pollard, in Leach and Palmer, 1978, 37.

162 with the thinking of educators like Kodaly and Orff: Skipping, clapping and counting games can be adapted to suit these needs.

Beyond folk music helping primary school children with their physical development, folk song can also help students to take pride their own local dialect, and through this their own regional identity and heritage. This ‘local vividness’ can even be the key to unlocking folk song as a relevant music for pupils to relate to on a personal level. In many cases, the Music Hall repertoire can be a better source of inspiration for dialect work, as exaggerated local stereotypes formed the basis for many of the characters adopted by regional performers, such Ridley (Newcastle), Will Fyfe (Glasgow) or Harry Champion (East London); as discussed above, many of the contributors considered parts of the Music Hall repertoire as admissible under their broadened definitions of folk. Geoffrey Summerfield, describing dialect work with his English classes in a Comprehensive in Willenhall, West Midlands, and later in a school in nearby West Bromwich, described having his students write deliberately in their own dialect, with the aim of writing work so laced with the syntax and vocabulary of the area that it would border on incomprehensible to the teaching body: an assignment inspired by the language of a broadside ballad on the subject of a cock fight in nearby Wednesbury.66 His aim was to demonstrate the way in which similar location specific work could enhance classroom understanding of the way the pupils themselves used language, stating: ‘Here we are; not there, but here; what local vividness, what peculiar near-at-home spring can we tap?’.67 Folk song was thus a useful grounding mechanism that could bring students closer to their own situated identity.

If suitable local material was not available, or a subject arose in class not covered by the extant traditional repertoire, then the consensus across the writers of Folk Song In Schools is that encouraging pupils to adapt, add to and re-write or compose songs in a traditional vein is an important creative tool, and in keeping with the contemporary conception of folk tradition. Song-making is the preferred term used to describe this process; differentiating the writing of a song in the folk idiom from musically literate composing helped de-mystify the process and remove any conceptual barriers to participation. This was a process to be introduced in Primary school, so as to make it familiar and un-threatening before the onset of teenage self- consciousness in secondary school. Pat Palmer’s thoughts on teaching folk music in a primary school are interspersed with notated example of such compositions by her pupils, each of

66 Summerfield, in Leach & Palmer, 1978, 78-79. 67 Ibid, 76. 163 which is properly credited to its creators. What is particularly striking is that half of her examples of pupil’s writing are collaborative efforts: created between two or more children, whether split down the traditional composer/lyricist division, with an accompaniment provided by one child for another’s song, or a full group shared writing.68 The songs, which Palmer reports were also developed in the student’s playtime, with dances and harmonies added without teacher intervention, fulfil a similar role and have comparable complexity to songs they would have been taught in primary school. This illustrates the inherently two-way process of younger student’s engagement with folk and folk-style material: they are taught songs to dance, clap, count and play, and then write songs to fit when they want to dance, clap or play to music.

The models suggested to inspire older children’s song-making are largely the recordings of second revival song writers such as Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, Cyril Tawny and others: those who composed new song within the folk idiom, rather than Bob Dylan, and others who had embraced popular music more closely.69 Robert Leach’s high regard for the Radio Ballads has already been explored above, but deserves mentioning again in the context of providing a basis for a song writing methodology: basing lyrics on spoken word of the song’s protagonists was one of MacColl’s most influential additions to folk music practice. Imitation of higher profile folk artists was not an aim in itself, but rather to empower students to create their own music inspired by lived experience. To this end, teaching children basic accompaniment skills on readily available, affordable instruments was a step towards individual musical autonomy, allowing them to create their own harmonic backing: guitars and autoharps are mentioned most frequently in this role as accessible chordal instruments. Whilst the aim of students achieving musical self-reliance was a commendable, it begs the question as to whether acquiring the requisite skill-set of a folk club performer was both too limited and too limiting a brief for school music departments to aspire to. For Brace at least, these very limitations were part of the appeal of the folk repertoire in schools; the eminently achievable nature of a song with a chorus, a few verses and a simple accompaniment was precisely what made it valuable to his students, allowing them to take responsibility for their own independent music making: ‘The chances of a keen amateur providing a satisfying

68 Pat Palmer, ‘Folk music in the Music Lesson’in Robert Leach & Roy Palmer (eds.), Folk Music in School (Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 51-55. 69 The notable exception is Geoffrey Brace, who proposes artists such as Leonard Cohen and Tom Paxton as inspirations. The theme is songs that work equally well unamplified as amplified, as he does not advocate music for which amplification is an inherent necessity. See Leach & Palmer, 1978, 65. 164 performance (satisfying to him especially) are much greater {in folk} than in any other genre’.70

3.4.4 Aurality

No teacher needs to be told how easily children learn by ear—consider the number of television jingles in the average primary-school child’s repertoire—and this is a facility which comes into its own {with folk music}.71

The advantages of aural learning are championed throughout Folk Song In Schools, primarily due to the increased accessibility of an orally transmitted repertoire over musics necessitating prior training in musical literacy. Folk music, having largely evolved through person-to- person transmission, is presented as tailor made for teaching by ear, requiring little adaption compared with notated traditions. Cooke and Dobbs, in their respective chapters, mention the Suzuki Method of violin teaching as being a useful contemporary analogue to the supposed traditional learning processes, despite the method having only recently been introduced into the UK: Folk Song In Schools actually marginally predates the establishment of the British Suzuki Institute. 72 Both authors suggest the method to be a compatible model with folk music, as it incorporates many techniques already native to traditional practice within the British Isles: imitation as a route to motor skill acquisition, a focus on aurality, privileging repertoire acquisition over musical literacy, family involvement in the learning process etc. Cooke suggests that Suzuki’s approach is closest to traditional Highland bagpipe tuition, especially as notation is seen as a starting point for further embellishment, rather than a final, set version.73 Whilst not aiming to completely banish musical notation from the classroom environment, Dobbs asserts that folk music-as-aurality should challenge and question the centrality of sight-reading practice in the school curriculum.74

When discussing the actual method by which a teacher should approach the teaching of folk song by ear, Dobbs placed considerable demand on the teacher’s musical confidence and performance ability.

70 Brace, in Leach & Palmer, 1978, 64. 71 Pollard in Leach & Palmer, 1978, 38. 72 For more detail, see: Suzuki, Shinʼichi, Elizabeth Mills, and Therese Cecile Murphy. The Suzuki concept: An introduction to a successful method for early music education (Diablo Press Incorporated, 1973). 73 Cooke in Leach & Palmer, 1978, 32-33. 74 Jack Dobbs, ‘Folk Music in the Music Lesson’in Robert Leach & Roy Palmer (eds.), Folk Music in School (Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 57. 165 If the teacher is to pass on the songs in this way {as per oral tradition}, the pupils must be seated in the classroom in a position which allows them to follow his or her facial expressions and any bodily gestures he may happen to use. … The first sing-through should give an impression of the song as a whole, conveying its character and meaning to the pupils. This can only be done when the teacher has made the song a part of himself – when instead of being read from the pages of a book it flows freely from the singer. One hopes that like the pupils he will have had the opportunity to from another singer, in person if possible, but failing that, from an authentic performance on tape, record or radio… if songs are transmitted orally the melody is also more likely to take wing, for the artificial barriers erected visually by bar-lines are removed, and the phrases can be learnt as wholes rather than as accumulations of bars.75

A teacher with years of singing experience, the requisite level of technical skill and interpretational ability, and, crucially, very little performance anxiety could certainly convey a song to a group in such a manner with enough conviction to provide an inspiration to their class; the intense level of scrutiny and exposure involved in such a performance would be a considerable impediment to a less self-assured teacher’s success in the same situation: there is a high level of assumed stagecraft in Dobbs’ method. Given staff comfortable with this approach, however, the benefits of learning to phrase a folk song without the crutch or ‘artificial barriers’ of notation would be entirely achievable.76 The use of recordings to bring students as close to the traditional singer as possible presents something of a dilemma, as the important visual element of Dobbs’ method is necessarily absent: although some film footage of traditional singers had been made (by the likes of Peter Kennedy and Peter Bellamy), it was not necessarily widely available, and nor was the equipment required to use it a guaranteed fixture of all schools in the late 1970s. As discussed above, the use of recordings as a repertoire source was a common second revival practice, but would still have required mediation and guidance from staff to prove effective for classroom use. Cooke suggested cassette recorders and listening booths as being useful tools for solo learning of folk song, but it is hard to imagine this as anything but prohibitively expensive and space-inefficient for use with larger class sizes at the time of publication.77 Dobb’s suggested methods could certainly be used effectively if the staff had sufficient experience and training, or the technological

75 Dobbs, in Leach & Palmer, 1978, 56. 76 Although undoubtedly useful when teaching British folk repertoire, the benefits of avoiding notation are even more apparent if working with, for example, Balkan or African folk musics, which frequently feature rhythm patterns unfamiliar to the Western ear. In my own teaching practice, I deliberately do not use notation when introducing unfamiliar time signatures, nor do I ever mention that there is anything untoward in the rhythmic divisions of the piece. 11/8 and 5/4 are much less intimidating when experienced as a pulse, rather than attempting to read them from a page, and students are invariably delighted when what they have just achieved by ear is shown to them notated afterwards. 77 Cooke, in Leach & Palmer, 1978, 33. 166 substitutes were readily available, but those conditions would have been a challenge to meet for schools with limited budgets or lacking specialist music staff.

Along with direct aural learning, Pollard suggests that the use of incidental recorded folk music as a sonic backdrop during other activities—at the start of assembly, during art or craft lessons etc.— can both allow a teacher to judge what kind of material will be best received by a class, and familiarize the children with the material before it is taught in greater depth; He also cautions that should a child pick up a song by ear, they should be provided with a written copy of the words soon afterwards, to avoid any accidental mishearings.78 This is an attempt to normalize the folk repertoire as part of the everyday soundscape of the classroom, which could be interpreted as a move toward low-level indoctrination, albeit one with a benign intent: folk song would not necessarily otherwise fall within the children’s passive listening purview. Aural learning could be both active via direct tuition and passive by absorption, with both methods complementing each other. The latter approach went some way toward addressing another potential pitfall of teaching folk songs in the manner described by Dobbs above, namely that it does not always translate well to the teaching of larger groups, wherein the interpretational individualism inherent in solo or small group folk song performance would be hampered as numbers increased.

3.4.5 Interpretation and Accompaniment

The main aim of a folk singer is to communicate a story, not to make beautiful noises. The resulting performance may be arresting, for in the course of telling the tale the singer might employ all kinds of melodic and rhythmic variations or employ a striking tone of voice. But these skills are all devices which the singer uses to interpret the song.79

The above quote, from Sandra Kerr’s chapter on singing style and accompaniment, showcases another second revival ideological shift back toward the Nealite: the content of a folk song is once again privileged above its form, as opposed to the melodic focus of Sharp, Vaughan Williams and their associates.80 As already discussed above, folk song as a means of communication in which the tune is merely a vehicle for the narrative is a common theme

78 Pollard, in Leach & Palmer, 1978, 38. 79 Sandra Kerr, ‘Singing Style and Accompaniment’, in Robert Leach & Roy Palmer (eds.), Folk Music in School (Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 137. 80 James Reeves, The Idiom Of The People: English Traditional Song from the MSS of Cecil Sharp (London: Heinemann Ltd., 1958), 11-13. 167 running through the book, but this does not imply that the contributors felt that the tune should be forgotten, merely that it should be subservient to the story.81 With this notion as the guiding principle, there are numerous references to how folk song should be performed; Kerr’s chapter deals almost exclusively with issues of interpretation, but other contributors also express their opinions and offer guidance, albeit with varying degrees of detail. Both Kerr and Brace stress the notion that folk music is a discipline in its own right, separate from, but no less important than, the rigors of art musics: Kerr quotes renowned Irish collector and piper Brendan Breathnach to add further authority to the assertion.82 Whilst Pat Palmer was keen to stress that, for children, kinesthetic and social elements of singing, clapping, counting and skipping games are more important than the aesthetic appreciation, she did not to imply that aesthetic considerations should be ignored.83 Unsurprisingly for a former member of the Critic’s group, Kerr asserts that the ‘free and easy’ approach prevalent in the late fifties and early sixties had given rise to the notion that folk singing was a simple process, and seeks to redress that notion in her chapter, although admittedly not by offering a ‘neatly formulated package guaranteed to give perfect results every time’: the onus is very much on the singer to spend the necessary time a song.

A common theme running through all the chapters is that the individual must create their own authenticity, and in general the preferred method is by referring to recordings of source singers. References to vocal style throughout the book frequently make mention of natural, open and unforced tone. According to Brace: ‘The voice must sound natural, unforced and effortless, with clear but not affected diction, good breath control and a strong sense of the drama or humour of the song’.84 Kerr develops all of these themes further, giving more specific guidelines as to how to achieve each facet of the performance. Firstly, she insists that the singer’s own speaking voice should form the basis of their singing tone; a folk singers’ accent should remain the same whether speaking or singing, precluding classical choral techniques such as the elongating of certain vowel sounds to facilitate the sustaining of a note. By implication, this would necessitate a degree of re-writing if a song with significant elements of non-native dialect was chosen, rather than imitating the accent of origin.85 Following on from the tone and accent, the phrasing should also be speech-like, with care

81 Dobbs, in Leach & Palmer, 1978, 57. 82 Kerr, in Leach & Palmer 1978, 136. 83 Palmer (P), in Leach & Palmer, 1978, 43. 84 Brace, in Leach & Palmer, 1978, 65. 85 This had been a particularly strong tenet of the Critics Group, but would still have been a topical discussion at the time Kerr was writing: Maddy Prior, vocalist for folk-rockers Steeleye Span, had notably made the opposite choice on the 1973 album Parcel of Rogues, adopting a Scots accent for songs such as the Jacobite anthem ‘Cam Ye O’er Frae France’ (Roud No. 5814). 168 taken not to place the stress on ‘unnatural’ syllables or to foreground words of lesser importance for the sake of melodic embellishment. Excessive dynamics, classical vibrato and other vocal effects are to be considered un-natural, and thus anathema to the authentic folk singer. A short case study of rhythmic variation and ornamentation, based on the song ‘George Collins’, uses notated examples to provide a starting point for the singer to work from. Adapting another methodology that had previously arisen in the Critic’s Group, Kerr presented a simplified version of the Laban/MacColl scale of efforts, in order to give some ideas of how the different mental approaches could create different tones and textures.86

For the singer seeking new approaches to further their understanding of folk song, the guidance in Kerr’s chapter provides some excellent inroads toward achieving rounded performances with depth, detail and an informed individuality. Much of what was useful from the Critic’s Group’s innovations are present, but Kerr’s personal interpretation and adaption of these principles is presented as a less confrontational, more accessible set of guidelines. The distilled version of Kerr’s approach to folk song interpretation is as follows:

1: Know your song – this includes words, music, and historical context. 2: Listen to extant recordings of traditional versions for inspiration 3: Consider the origins, uses and traditional performance contexts of the song. 4: Read the text aloud to determine ‘speechlike’ patterns for phrasing. 5: Tell the story without singing, to fully explore the narrative. 6: Try to relate the song to your own experiences, or imagine what it would have been like: inhabit the character(s).

Turning to matters of accompaniment, Kerr is keen once again to stress that the accompaniment should serve the story of the song; the use of instruments should not: ‘…become a crutch for limp singing, or a substitute for understanding or caring for the songs’. She suggests three broad approaches to song accompaniment, giving examples of appropriate repertoire, technique and instrumentation, as well as some suggested listening for each. The first suggestion is linear and parallel accompaniment, in which the melody is mirrored by an instrument, either in unison or a fifth interval apart: whistles, fiddles, mandolin and are suggested as suitable for this use, and suitable songs would be those requiring a sense of unease or uncertainty such transportation songs. The use of a drone is the second suggestion, proving effective especially if using an instrument such as

86 Kerr, in Leach & Palmer, 1978, 67. 169 Northumbrian small pipes or Appalachian dulcimer, which can provide drones and a linear accompaniment at a volume which is easy to sing over without strain.87 The third option she presents is that of simple chordal accompaniments, suggesting guitar or concertina as ideal tools for the task: simple alternating bass note/chord patterns, possibly combined with a melody instrument, are as dense an accompaniment as Kerr puts forward as being appropriate: communicating the song’s meaning is still the primary goal. Being a chapter about song, her approach to accompaniment does not touch on appropriate playing for dance tunes, slow airs or other purely instrumental elements of the tradition.

For other contributors, most notably Brace and Dobbs, the emphasis is on accessibility and inclusivity over subtlety and style, and the legacy of the skiffle boom’s have-a-go attitude is more apparent. The instruments they mention are more likely to be found in a school music cupboard than specialist virtuoso folk instruments such as or Northumbrian small pipes: , guitar, banjo (unspecified whether 4 or 5 string), mandolin, , , flute, mountain dulcimer, drums, cymbals, bones and autoharp are all mentioned. Of these, the Autoharp and guitar are singled out for special praise: the Autoharp is held to be easy to use (once tuned of course), and the guitar praised for versatility, portability and, above all, ready availability. Use of electric guitars and drum kits is cited as a meaningful way of engaging popular musicians amongst the students, taking a inspiration from the folk-rock movement: The Albion Country Band and Fairport Convention are mentioned specifically. The implication is that if the desired application of a given folk song is to provide whole class or large group engagement, the social role that the song has been chosen for is of greater import than preserving the narrative intact, jarring with Kerr’s more cautious guidelines.

3.5 Folk Song In Schools: Nealism re-visited

Throughout the book, the values of the post-war revival can be seen to have supplanted the Sharpean orthodoxy which had dominated folk music education in Britain for half a century. With such a strong socialist undercurrent to the motivations of the second revival, Sharp’s position would have seemed deeply out of step with prevailing thinking: it had, after all, been constructed in, and defined by, opposition to the leftwing position of Neal and her

87 The are a bellows blown bagpipe specific to the North East of England – the last survivor of a number of County specific instruments found throughout England in the later medieval period. Being a parlour instrument with commensurate volume levels, they are not to be compared with the Great Highland Bagpipes, which are most definitely designed for outdoor applications. 170 collaborators. Additionally, the inflexible aesthetic standards of the older model had not allowed sufficient scope for evolution when faced with the changing nature of schools, pupils and the wider socio-political climate after the Second World War, leaving Sharp’s carefully presented songs with their piano parts looking distinctly anachronistic.

In Pollard’s call for passive learning of folk song, using carefully chosen records as background music during other activities, we see a reflection of Mary Neal’s assertion that whilst songs were learned during with the Esperance Guild, they were not being actively taught. In the emphasis on ownership and agency within folk song, where songs serve the singer’s needs, we see a key Nealite tenet: that the feeling and experience of the activity, the individuals ability to inhabit the song, dance or tune, are the most important factors in engaging and retaining a student’s interest. The guidance provided by Kerr toward song interpretation places the emphasis on the individual’s relationship to the song, and the responsibility of adopting an appropriate aesthetic on the singer’s own judgment: individual variation was key to Neal’s understanding of folk tradition, and was inextricably linked with the creating of the emotional connection to the material that she so valued.

The most extreme ideas for school folk music implementation are found in Cooke’s chapter on traditional learning, in which we see the closest analogues to Neal’s peer led, lateral approach. Cooke suggests radical revisions of schools music practice to better adapt successful techniques found in traditional learning communities; specifically he proposes to abandon formal music lessons altogether, in favour of an informal, folk club style setting. This would allow the mixing the age groups of the learners, and utilizing the knowledge and skills of older pupils to teach younger pupils new repertoire: essentially peer lead education overseen by a teacher in a co-coordinator’s role. The aim was ultimately social, rather than musical, teaching ‘the kind of social co-operation that is very necessary in today’s highly interdependent society’: folk music as community focused social work, another Nealite ideal. Although informal popular music learning in schools was to be theorized by Lucy Green in the 2001, and implemented successfully by the Musical Futures initiative during the opening years of the new millennium, Cooke’s ideas were probably too far ahead of their time; they were certainly not in keeping with mainstream schooling in the 1970s.88 Regarding the opposition to the top-down, expert lead approach of the Sharpean methodology, although the resistance to externally imposed aesthetic ideals is present throughout—most notably in

88 Lucy Green, How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead For Music Education (London and New York: Ashgate Press, 2001).

171 Brace, Dobbs and Kerr’s contributions—it is Cooke again who makes the most clearly Nealite attack on the damaging influence of the expert:

How many young people are sacrificed on the altar of excellence? How many adults are there who say they cannot even sing? The answer is, unfortunately, far too many; they learned this during their school years because of the emphasis on certain “high standards” which, while relevant to the concert-hall platform, unfortunately have little to do with domestic music making.89

This does not, however, imply that a return to Nealite values was inherently superior in all aspects. The second revival’s approaches to the teaching of folk music, being broadly similar to the Nealite ideology of the early first revival, had inherited the weaknesses as well as the strengths of that movement. Although the ideals were admirable, the implementation was inherently problematic, and hard to generalize: persuading a head teacher to abandon all formal music lessons in favour of a school-wide folk club, for example, would have been as unlikely then as it is now. In this regard, the movement was not producing education specific resources in any real quantity, leaving the adaption of traditional material to the talents of individual teachers. With the exception of Folk Song In Schools there was little detailed guidance as to how this could be achieved; even then, the book had arrived nearly three decades after the post-war revival began, and was itself the result of much trial and error by teachers attempting to navigate the problem for themselves. The guidance offered by Leach, Palmer and their contributors did not take the form of set procedures, plans or rules that could be followed, but consisted of examples of previously successful work, intended to provide inspiration: the guidelines invariably required adapting to fit the specific application. Part of the issue was the often intensely situated nature of the examples given; they had been successful precisely because they suited , where, when and why: that particular class, in that school, responding to a specific set of (often local) issues, at that time.

Although the approaches advocated by Leach, Palmer et al are generally better adapted to the nature of an organically evolving, community focused musical tradition, and thus able to respond to changing times and student needs in a way that Sharp’s more rigid outlook had not, the resistance to providing situationally specific guidance or pre-prepared materials left the prospects for success or failure of any folk project weighing heavily on the shoulders of the teaching staff. This presents the readers of Folk Music In Schools not so much a guide to teaching folk music, but a guide for already competent folk musicians on how to teach folk

89 Cooke, in Leach & Palmer, 1976, 32. 172 material more effectively. Folk music education had found the flexibility it had long needed to remain fresh and relevant to the student body, but there was still a barrier to entry, as the assumption of staff having prior participant membership of the folk community was central to all practices described.

173 Chapter 4. Folkworks: Tradition in the Making

Folkworks, a dedicated folk arts development agency based in Newcastle, was founded in 1988 with folk musician and composer Alistair Anderson and administrator and fundraiser Ros Rigby as co-directors. Combining a unique artistic vision with considerable business acumen, the organisation was to have a considerable impact on the subsequent teaching of folk and traditional music both in Britain and beyond. From 1988 until 2002 Folkworks operated as an independent organisation, although often collaborating with partners for specific projects and, after their 2002 integration into the management structure of North Music Trust (NMT) at the new Sage Gateshead centre on the South bank of the Tyne, many Folkworks branded projects continued in the region. Tracing the various activities the organisation undertook is not straightforward however, as many Folkworks projects took place before widespread internet proliferation, and there is no publicly available official written record: what web presence there was before integration has long since been removed and replaced by more recent North Music Trust official copy on the Sage website. In the brief overview of their major undertakings contained in this chapter, the disparate sources used to construct the history have included contemporary press reports, passing book references and archive film, but the majority of the information is drawn from interviews with key figures. This is entirely fitting, as the history of the organisation is inextricably linked with the life and work of Alistair Anderson, from his earliest inspirations whilst learning his craft as a concertina player and Northumbrian piper, through his professional career as a performing and composing folk musician. Anderson has no official biography beyond the few paragraphs on his own website—at the time of writing he does not even have a dedicated Wikipedia entry—and as such he is the single most reliable authority on himself.

Whilst Anderson’s formative years occurred during the period discussed in the previous section on post-war revival, by the time Folkworks was officially formed, there had been some changes within the folk scene as a whole. By the early 1980s, the second revival had lost some momentum and begun to fragment, evidence of which can be seen within the academic literature. In 1985, Dave Harker launched a scathing academic attack on the motivations, ethics and outcomes of both folk revivals.1 Following closely after Hobsbawn and Ranger’s 1983 publication of The Invention of Tradition, in which the editors drew attention to a tendency to overstate the antiquity of supposedly traditional practices, especially

1 Dave Harker, Fakesong: The Manufacture of British ‘Folksong’ 1700 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985). 174 within the bounds of nationalist discourse, Harker went much further: he alleged that the entirety of the folk song revival processes had been fabricated by the major figures of the movement, who had done so for reasons of both ideology and profit.2 Central to his thesis was the notion that even the second revival’s most left wing luminaries had been involved in the wholesale appropriation the musical heritage of the working class in order to commodify it for middle class consumption and their own personal gain. Just as with Hobsbawn, Harker had a strong Marxist agenda, but here he was also attacking those, such as Bert Lloyd and Ewan MacColl, who had considered their own motivation and contribution to be in the interests of a Marxist cause: the leftist dominance of the second revival had descended into infighting over who and what was the “real” Marxist: essentially a game of political one-upmanship. Whilst Harker’s work, particularly his use of numerical evidence, has received concerted criticism from more right-leaning scholars such as C. J. Bearman (whose work Harker’s should definitely be read in tandem with), Harker’s assault on the preconceptions of revivalism was timely: however worthily intentioned, the political, social and capital motivations of second revival scholars had largely gone unchallenged in academic literature prior to Fakesong.3 Most significantly for folk music education, this wider questioning of older tropes paved the way for new practice models.

4.1 Alistair Anderson: The Importance of Inspiration

Alistair Anderson describes his earliest encounters with folk music as being largely coincidental to his other interests at the time. At age eleven or twelve, he was a member of a walking and climbing club who had a monthly Ceilidh as part of their wider social activities programme. These were inspirational, energetic affairs, attended by young people who danced with real commitment: the very opposite of the staid ‘naffness’ he would often encounter at dances in later life. Other folk influences came in more traditional form from Scottish TV shows that were also broadcast in the North East, with artists like Ray and and The Corries, as well as the more chart friendly artists such as Bob Dylan; following up on the influences of with a blues guitar playing friend, he also encountered the prior generations of black American blues artists, through the Newcastle music shop J. G. Windows. This store, along with another in the nearby Grainger Market, also stocked a few books of Irish folk tunes. He started to attend local folk clubs in his teens, such as Ponteland,

2 Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1-3. 3 Christopher J. Bearman, ‘Cecil Sharp in Somerset: Some Reflections on the Work of David Harker’, Folklore, 113/1 (Apr., 2002), 11-34. See also: C. J. Bearman, ‘Who Were the Folk? The Demography of Sharp's Somerset Folk Singers’, The Historical Journal, 43/3 (2000), 751-775. 175 which he described as having a lot of duos imitating the Corries, and The Bridge which, being in central Newcastle, was closer to where he lived in Wallsend, although the atmosphere was a bit more formal. Having purchased an from a friend’s grandmother for the princely sum of five pounds—paid for by eight months of doing a paper round—Alistair began to participate in scratch Ceilidh bands (i.e. bands consisting of whoever happened to be there at the time), and making influential contacts on the local folk scene. This was a key training ground for him as a player, but also a profound source of inspiration, working with the very best on the circuit.

It meant that me, as somebody still at school, was being drawn into this circle of people who were pretty experienced performers, I mean Ray Fisher was there, having seen her on the telly and there she was at the club (She’d just moved down to be with Colin [Ross]), Johnny [Handle] had been performing for years, both in the jazz world and the beginnings of the folk world from the late fifties on (This would’ve been about ’64, something like that). So I was getting drawn into that circle.4

Another moment that was to provide lasting inspiration was making a trip the thirty-five miles or so north to attend the Alnwick Gathering, a festival which included concerts, hosted the competitions of the Northumbrian Piper’s Society, and had a public dance. Rather than the three day, family friendly affair that the festival represents today, the Alnwick Gathering Anderson describes was a rather different proposition in the mid 1960s.

As early as ’64 (I was surprised it was this early but I found the programme for it not all that long ago) we went to the Alnwick Gathering and I remember me mum took us up (me dad had just gone over to work in Canada), and I was like 16? Now the Alnwick gathering in those days was just on the Friday night, and you went to the concert in the guest hall which went on 'til at least half ten, and then the competitions started and the dance started in the two halls in Alnwick (the dance in the big Northumberland Hall, and the competitions over in the old town hall) and the dance went until the competitions had finished, which was about half past five in the morning! Fortunately me mother was just completely ‘Ah, fine, no problem’ [because I had no transport]. The dance was amazing! In 1964, Alnwick was about in 1958, so all the pitmen from the Shilbottle colliery were all there, and of course they were all in drape jackets and they were all still in Bill Haley mode, y’know, the Beatles hadn’t quite arrived in Alnwick yet! But they all did certainly the strip the willow, and the eightsome reel and the American two-steps and all this sort of thing.

It was this setting in which another major set of influences was to enter Anderson’s life, in the form of the older Northumbrian musician’s such as the celebrated piper Billy Pigg, and the shepherds Will Atkinson, Joe Hutton and Willy Taylor. Alistair was keen to stress that this

4 Alistair Anderson, Interviewed 07/12/2010, hereafter referred to as ‘AA Interview’. 176 was a very different experience to the second revival folk clubs and local dances he had been used to

So there I was being completely thrown into this, and some of it made sense because of the stuff we’d done with this climbing group dance stuff [aged 12 in walking group], but a whole lot of it was new. I remember being taught the American two-step by this big farmers wife and just being thrown around ‘Go on, come on’. And the band was whoever wasn’t competing in the competitions at that moment, so it was a huge band! So we went and I started to get to know the musicians up there, and it was this big group of musicians. So Billy Pigg was very central, the Cheviot Ranters were very central, George Mitchell was the main organizer there (George and Billy between them were the main movers)… and then of course [Willy] Taylor and [Will] Atkinson, so Taylor would’ve been probably just in his late 50s… I can see him now coming down the stairs, those narrow little twisty stairs at Alnwick, and he was full o’ gan on. And Atkinson was playing mainly the button box, even then he was known for his ‘moothie’ [harmonica] playing, but certainly in the band he got the button box out. So these people were getting to know me, in fact the next year I got asked to go and play in the concert, which was remarkable because this was… I mean the distance between Wallsend and Alnwick in those days, I mean its still pretty different, but in those days it was like a completely different world.

If able to meet and mingle with players of this stature was an experience which Alistair valued immensely, then being asked to play alongside them as a teenager was doubly so. Just as with his formative experience at the Bridge folk club, this sense of being invited in, being up close and learning from making music with the experience of the best players around, simply as a reward for his enthusiasm, was to prove one of the inspirations that led to ‘twin track’ approach he would later develop for Folkworks. One particular meeting was to have a profound influence on him as a young man: Billy Pigg. Anderson describes being taken to Pigg’s house for a formal introduction:

It was a moment that absolutely changed my life, because he was a spectacular musician, and incredibly generous guy, and his wife made the best drop scones I’ve ever tasted… he was very happy to spend time… actually, at that point we couldn’t play together, ‘cause he played the pipes, and a chanter that was way sharp of F, somewhere just flat o’ G, and I had this concertina [points to box by his feet] which is in fixed pitch.5 I would learn tunes off him, but just go backwards and forwards. [He was] very, very enthusiastic, very supportive, and there’s all sorts of interesting little stories. I was up there once, and a fellow called Jim Bryant who was a very polite, upright member of the Northumbrian Pipers Society, and very definitely ‘from the town’ and did things properly [was also present]. Anyway, it wasn’t the first time I’d

5 Northumbrian Small Pipes are traditionally tuned to an older standard pitch than the current A440hz. The tonic pitch of the traditional chanter sits, according to piper Dr. Anthony Robb, approximately twenty cents sharp of conventional concert F, which equates to about 40% of the way towards F#. This produces a note not found within the conventional 12 of the western chromatic scale. Modern players tend to own a traditional chanter for solo work, and a conventionally pitched example to play with musicians who can’t adjust their tuning to compensate (such as free reed instruments or keyboards). 177 been up there, but I hadn’t been up there that many times, I’d [only] been playing probably 9 months at the most (if you said it was 6 months it wouldn’t surprise me). So I played a few things, and he’d played some stuff backwards and forwards, and then he said to me ‘so Alistair, is there anything you want us to play?’. So asked him to play a tune that I must’ve obviously been just learning, and I say will you play ‘because he was a bonny lad’ (which is a very beginners sort of tune), and Jim Bryant says ‘you can’t ask Billy Pigg to play ‘Because He Was A Bonny Lad!’ (It was like asking Ally Bain to play three blind mice or something). And Billy said, Ah, no, no no, if that’s what the lad wants to hear’ (he’d obviously clicked that I was learning it and wanted to hear how it should go), he says, “that’s what we should play”. And of course he played it with all the spirit and attack that a great player can play a comparatively simple tune [with]. So somewhere, all that sort of stuff, both the generosity and the seeing the importance of the process, and also seeing the capacity to take a simple tune and make it bloody fantastic… all these things get layered down, especially when you come across it fairly early on. So I was fantastically fortunate to meet him…

Anderson had not seen or heard the Northumbrian Small Pipes until his teens, having had no prior idea that they existed. Enthused upon first hearing them, he made a soundless faux chanter from an old ledger ruler to practice his fingering before he managed to acquire a set for himself; the Northumbrian pipes are unique amongst British folk instruments in that, having a closed rather than open chanter, the notes are sounded by taking a single finger off the instrument and breaking the air column to sound the note, rather than placing the fingers on to lengthen the air column and lower the note, as with conventional pipes and woodwind. The experience of being taken seriously by this pillar of the piping world, of not being patronised or spoken down to, was crucial to Alistair’s later thinking about what folk music education could be: when asked to write an essay at school about a moment that changed his life, this was the story he chose to write.

By the time Anderson left school in 1964, the central figures from the scratch bands for the Bridge ceilidhs had coalesced into his first serious band: . Initially made up of Johnny Handle, Tommy Gilfellon, Colin Ross and Anderson, the name was a tribute the both the Cheviot Ranters dance band and the High Level Bridge: a Newcastle landmark, the north end of which is next the Bridge Hotel, the venue for the folk club in which they met. Bringing a regional English repertoire to the attention of the wider national audience was innovative (Anderson believes them to have been the first to do so), as was the heavy emphasis on instrumental in their concert sets. Anderson states that they were very much catering to a younger audience, and had the energy to match. As folk festivals began to introduce the Late Night Extra dances (LNE) to cater for the younger and more energetic attendees once the regular programmed events had finished, the Ranters were

178 the band of choice: the all nighters at Alnwick had stood him in good stead, as ‘no-one else would stay up’ to play until the early hours. The most extreme example of this was at Cambridge 1968, when Anderson recalls a twenty-two hour working day!

Attending college with the aim of becoming a teacher, Anderson continued to play and record with the Ranters, who had three LPs available on the Topic and Leader labels by 1970. He stayed with the Ranters as he entered his teaching career, but also began to experiment with solo and duo ventures, which resulted in the recording of his first solo LP, Alistair Anderson Plays English Concertina, in 1972, once again issued on the Leader label; soloists such as Pigg, Atkinson and Taylor were major inspirations for Anderson, so the move seemed natural. With a couple of years of classroom experience under his belt, and despite his love of teaching, it became clear that if he was ever to make the leap into full time musicianship, then now was the time. Having saved enough money from gigs to live for a year, his head teacher gave him permission to leave and pursue his goal.6 The Ranters not being willing to go full time, despite the fact they could sell out Newcastle City Hall, much of his early professional work was as a solo artist. A difficulty for a solo instrumentalist was that the folk clubs, by now firmly established nationwide, were mostly interested in booking singers; a few clubs, such as The Ship in Gloucester, were prepared to take the risk of booking a solo instrumental artist, but this was not a common occurrence.7 Subscription series of concerts in the United States proved a welcome source of income. The common format was a series of six concerts, with four classical recitals, one jazz concert and one ‘something else’, the latter being Anderson’s ticket into the circuit. He credits the US audiences as a real education in stagecraft, as they were extremely responsive and keen to let a performer if they were enjoying themselves or not. The US circuit was also to lead to another revelation that would be a strong influence on Folkworks.

So I started establishing a pretty substantial touring network, but throughout that, I was starting to see that a lot of people [who would not otherwise encounter folk music]…{he pauses and thinks}… The folk scene in England was going very well, but it was absolutely below the threshold of visibility. If you knew it was there, you knew all about it. You had the little local magazines for twenty pence on the door of the club. If you were coming to the club, you picked it up and you knew what was happening all around, you knew the festivals that were coming up. If you couldn’t

6 The exact timing of this is unclear. Anderson states that he finished teaching to go solo in 1971 having already released his solo LP, however the Leader Catalogue lists this as a 1972 release. Either way, he was certainly a full time musician by the end of 1972. 7 This information is not in interview recordings. It transpired in an off-the-record conversation that my father, who at the time was running Gloucester Folk Club, had booked Anderson very early in his solo career, a favour which he had clearly not forgotten. 179 make the first step, you just didn’t know it was there, you didn’t know anything was happening at all. Whereas, over there [USA], they had that scene [folk clubs], but then there was this whole other thing, where people who were having no general contact with it [folk music], came in contact with it, and then really liked it. So it suddenly clicked—there’s a lot of people out there would really like this stuff, and perhaps that’s the same in England? Perhaps there’s a lot of people out there would really like it, but just don’t know its there. And then also, you started seeing occasional things where you’d be asked to go into schools and play, and again: “Hey, all these people like this stuff”, so you think: “Ah…”. So little cogs started to fall into place between… all these old guys I learned from were fantastically generous in sharing their ideas with me. I’m going into schools, and these kids are responding to it, but I’m only there for an hour and then going on somewhere else, but actually you’d see some projects where things had gone on a bit longer and think “Hey! That’s starting to work”. And you’re coming back home and thinking about that…

As noted in the previous chapter, the folk club scene in England was beginning to turn inward and metaphorically preach to the already converted choir by the mid 1970s, and Anderson’s observation of a circuit in which the clubs were only advertising to their own audience tallies with this. To many, the folk scene was the folk clubs and vice versa, with no need to look beyond them except for choosing which festivals to attend as a holiday. Concert halls, long abandoned by the second revival as inauthentic, now held a completely separate audience with no knowledge of the folk scene, yet the general assumption that they were necessarily mutually exclusive groups was proving to be false, at least in Anderson’s experience in the USA at least. Concert Halls can be prohibitively large and expensive venues for experimental folk music events, but the rise of a new touring circuit in the UK provided precisely the type of location required for such a venture. Following on from pioneering projects such as the M.A.C in Birmingham’s Cannon Hill Park in 1962 and the addition of the Purcell Rooms to London’s South Bank in 1968, the late 1970s and early 1980s saw a growth in smaller capacity, regional arts centres throughout the UK.

Another contributing factor was that Anderson had begun to develop new music, based on the traditions he had immersed himself in, but expanded to include new elements. Traditionally, ceilidh band music contained very little harmonic arrangement, with the ‘frontline’—the melody instruments—mostly playing in unison. Anderson described the Northumbrian tradition of playing ‘seconds’ or harmony lines, often associated with duets in piping competitions, as an inspiration that more could be done with dance tune. He was already writing standard dance tunes, another practice he had adopted having seen that his heroes were known locally as tunesmiths as well as soloists, so rather than ‘messing with’ traditional examples, he used his own tunes to explore these new ideas. Another inspiration was drawn from older manuscripts, such as the William Vicker’s manuscript, then held at the Society for 180 Antiquities headquarters in Newcastle: this personal collection of fiddle tunes, of which nearly six hundred survive despite the manuscript missing a number of pages, date to the 1770s. Having secured funding from Northern Arts to copy the MSS in the 1970s, Anderson had added a fair number of them to his repertoire, noting from this and other manuscripts the peculiarities of this older repertoire: time signatures and tune styles no longer prevalent in the wider tradition, such as 3/2 Hornpipes and Cotillions, as well as a key changes and note choices no longer considered conventional.8 Believing that it was through the stylistic vocabulary of the individual player within a regional tradition that made tunes ‘really come alive’, Anderson believed it necessary to write melodically ‘through this filter’ of local and individual style, using traditional tune forms as a starting point for more complex compositions.

The result was the 1982 Topic Records release Steel Skies, a fifty-two minute, through- composed suite of music for Concertina, Northumbrian Pipes, Fiddle, Flute and Mandolin. By writing a piece of music of a length that would be familiar to classical, orchestral musicians, but giving the parts to folk musicians to play, the composition retained the individual interpretation and flair of the individual musician despite have been the product of a single composer’s imagination. The layering of melodies is a particularly striking feature, with multiple independent tunes occurring simultaneously. Despite this, many of the suites’ theme tunes are recognizably of traditional dance tune form, and several are regularly still played in sessions in the North-East: particularly ‘The Road to the North’ and ‘Dog-Leap Stairs’. Steel Skies was the first work of its kind, and received considerable critical attention at the time, and lead to a sold out live performance of the work at the South Bank centre on November 4th 1982.9 In a contemporary interview with the Guardian, published only three days before the concert, Anderson explained this evolutionary musical step as being a natural response to his own life and times:

Because I am of the 20th century, because I am a travelled person and because I listen to other kinds of music, my own music has come out quite different. I'm not Willy Taylor — I've not been a shepherd all my life; I'm not Tom Clough — I've not been down the mines all my life. I'm Alistair Anderson with a background which is quite different from those players. So the music I play is different.10

8 Matt Seatle’s Great Northern Tunebook (2nd Edition) contains the entire manuscript. 9 Stewart Bonney, ‘By popular request, the music plays on’, The Northumbrian, November 2008, 33-34. Retrieved here: http://www.alistairanderson.com/articles/northumbrian.html, (23/10/17). 10 David Ward, ‘Talking Tunes’ Arts Guardian, November 1st 1982: Retrieved from Alistair Anderson’s Press page on his website: http://www.alistairanderson.com/articles/guardian-1982.htm, (23/10/17). 181 This was precisely the kind of music needed to make the crossover to the Arts Centre audiences, and lead to Anderson being asked back to curate three further years of week long Summer Folk concert series, with themed events—a Scottish Night, a Fiddle night etc.— proving to be a success with the public: Anderson recalls that most nights were sold out, and the audience contained many people who would not have otherwise come to a folk music event. The 1984 season included a commission for a similar long form composition to Steel Skies, for which Anderson created another suite for folk quintet entitled Windy Gyle, later issued on LP by Black Crow records.11 Between the Southbank series and running similar events aimed at the local population in the Northumbrian town of Rothbury, Anderson’s impressive ability to enthuse a new converts to folk music prompted Northern Arts to appoint him as their folk musician-in-residence. This relationship was to prove crucial to the founding of Folkworks.

4.2 Folkworks’ Educational Precursors

Despite the vision needed to establish an organization such as Folkworks, it did not spring into existence in a complete educational vacuum. Anderson asserts that the folk scene in the UK at large was beginning to notice that their audience was dwindling, and seemed to have no notion of what to do to counter this trend. There were, he states, concerns: an organization called Perform had been set up in Cheshire 1982 after an impassioned talk by decrying the state of the folk scene’s demographic, although in Anderson’s assessment, ‘They’d got some people together to try and talk about it, but nothing really had happened’.12 The modern publicity that had accompanied Jay Unger’s adult fiddle workshops, along with the professionalism and attendance of the events themselves, had left a lasting impression. Compared with this, the workshops at British folk festivals showed little of this flair, or even basic preparation. In recalling a concertina workshop given at Cleethorpes Folk Festival, Anderson was scathing of the British attempts at inclusion:

Most workshops were sort of “it’s a guitar workshop, so I’m going to sit and play, [they’re] going to watch and ask questions and then we’ll all try little bits” but there was very little structure to it. I remember people being amazed when I’d brought something [written out], and I had the basic tune drawn up big, so everybody could

11 Listed on Anderson’s composition list in the biography section of his website, which can be retrieved here: http://www.alistairanderson.com/bio-comp.htm, (23/10/17). 12 AA Interview. He remembered ‘Perform’ mainly as he had borrowed their mailing list to sell tickets for the Steel Skies tour. 182 see it, and then I had little blocks of paper with the decorations, and a bit of blu-tack, and [I could] stick it on. “Oh look, that makes it different, and this grace note there…” And the thought of that, to give that much thought to a workshop before you actually arrived, was looked upon as pretty radical.13

The professional attitude may have been lacking on the festival circuit, but there were, at either end of the British Isles, attempts to shore up the local folk culture by involving children and young people in locally focused, community driven folk arts projects. Of these, the two that Anderson recalled as being operational immediately before the formal founding of Folkworks were the Scottish Fèis and Devon’s Wren Trust. The fact that similar solutions were appearing nationwide implied that there was a broader need to solve a precisely the problem which Anderson was describing: bringing in people from outside of the existing folk scene and creating spaces in which they could actively participate, creating a strong community basis for continuity.

The Fèis movement of the Scottish Highlands and Islands began as a community-run cultural tuition festival on the Island of Bharraigh (Barra) in 1981. With a focus on preserving the musical, linguistic and dialectic heritage of the approximately sixty thousand Gaelic language speakers in Scotland, the Fèisean aimed to bring children and young adults into positive and inspirational contact with the traditional arts expressions of Gaelic culture.14 Within five years a second affiliated festival, Fèis Rois, was established in Ullapool in Ross-shire, with a broadly similar agenda, although organized and run by a different committee. Of particular importance was the community strengthening aspect, which was seen as a way to help each of the individual Fèisean perpetuate themselves through the emotional investment of the local population.15 By the time Folkworks began, further Fèisean were forming: Fèis an Earraich on the Isle of Skye, Feis Tir a’ Mhurain on South Uist and Benbecula.16 Each was a self- contained festival, inspired by the previous events in other areas to run something for their own community: the event on South Uist was set up by a group of mothers concerned by a lack of Gaelic school provision.17 The movement continues to this day: by the twenty-fifth anniversary in 2007, they could report an annual attendance of around thirteen thousand across more than forty Fèisean nationwide.

13 I can confirm that this was still common practice amongst players of the older guard when I first started attending folk festivals in the early 1990s: in one Bert Jansch led guitar workshop that lasted over an hour and a half, all that was actually taught was the first bar of Angie. 14 Kate Martin (ed.), Fèis: the first twenty-five years of the Fèis movement (Skye: Fèisean nan Gàidheal, 2006), 8-9. 15 Ibid, 13-15. 16 Ibid, 59-65. 17 Martin, 2006, 62. 183

Co-founders Paul Wilson and Marilyn Tucker established Devon’s Wren Music in 1983, although later re-branded as the Wren Trust following the acquisition of charitable status in 1987. Wilson recalled that Alistair Anderson had worked with them on a project around 1985, and had expressed an interest, during a car journey to a venue, in adapting their community focused folk arts projects for use in the North East.18 Although Anderson had no recollection of any such conversation—stating that Fèis movement were the real inspiration from within the UK— he confirmed that he had indeed worked for them in a workshop setting around that time, and was aware of the work they were doing in the South West.19 Currently operating as Wren Music once again, with all mention of the Trust and the organisation’s history removed from their current web presence, they employ half a dozen project musicians in addition to Wilson and Tucker, and continue to deliver community folk arts projects, such as folk orchestras and folk choirs, mostly within the Devon area.20

In the North of England, Anderson recalled that older folk arts organizations were making little impact: the EFDSS had no real effective presence in the area, and that the CCÉ in Newcastle were “a closed circle” at the time, with no interest in broadening their demographic. The Northumbrian Piper’s Society offered classes for aspiring pipers, but their reach and influence were limited. There were isolated pockets of work around individual schools though: a geography teacher named John Ray had started a small Saturday Ceilidh band called Crab Apple in Cumbria, which Anderson and Martin Dunn had attended to help out on occasion. Another similar project involved a school in Northumberland, which had been left without formal music tuition:

There was one other very, very good precursor: Mary Crane (Mary Cannon then) was in a school in Ashington, which was a middle school, and it had no music teacher for a couple of years. So there was no music, and eventually she said “Well, I play the fiddle a bit”, and the Head says “well, ok, teach a few kids the whistle”. Her formal music education was [minimal]—her reading was worse than mine, which is saying something—but she taught the kids all by ear, and then with some dots [Musical notation]. Whistle and fiddle. It was Irish stuff, because that’s what she’d grown up in. Before you knew where she was, she was taking them up to Glasgow and stuff.

The common factors between all of these projects are that they were focused on community level action, and run from within those communities, be they a Scottish Island, a Devonshire

18 Unrecorded informal interview at AFO conference 2010. 19 AA Interview. 20 Wren Music, ‘Biography’, Wren Music Website, http://www.wrenmusic.co.uk/index.php/who-we-are/who-we- are, (link no longer functional due to website update, 23/10/17). 184 village or a Northumberland school. They were happening independently and without support from pre-existing folk-arts organizations, and they were also not tied in to the network of folk clubs and festivals that had sustained the scene through the 1960s an 1970s, and was now becoming increasingly insular. What they all lacked, at that time, was the ability to reach outside of their locality, to where there was no pre-existing community to draw on, to inspire the formation of a self-sustaining interest group. That leap was to be taken by Folkworks, in part by utilizing the new network of arts centres, in part by using nationally renowned performers as their tutor base. Anderson knew that his idea for such an ‘intervention’ was unique: An intervention which really started to open the potential for a much wider number of kids without that background [of parents already involved in folk scene] to stumble across it, and some of them to keep going? I wasn’t aware of that happening, certainly in the North of England, and by and large generally across England…

4.3 The Foundations of Folkworks

The beginnings of what would later become Folkworks lay in a request from Northern Arts for guidance on how to assist the traditional music and dance scene in the North East region. This was clearly a new era: speaking about the organisation’s contribution in the 1970s, Anderson was curtly dismissive ‘They were meant to support regional traditions, but did bugger all about it’. Anderson’s proposed solution to re-invigorating the Northern folk scene was a concert tour, featuring big name artists, which would also concurrently deliver workshops in schools local to the venues they would play. In September 1986, a reformed line-up of the Scottish and Irish folk super group , Alistair Anderson himself and members of the Tyneside troupe Clan Na Gael went out on the road, taking in sixteen concert venues across five northern counties, and delivering workshops in the vicinities of the gigs. In Anderson’s own words:

I started thinking if we’re not getting the next generation through, what they need to do is get involved. Sitting and listening to a concert is one thing, but, y’know… get involved with the stuff. We started with this tour, which was ‘the Boys of the Lough’ (who were a great, lively band), a couple of Irish dancers, who were again good, and visually [too], and myself, and we did schools in the afternoon and the new arts centres in the evening. [We had] fairly modern looking publicity, but I’d gone round all the education authorities (in those days the structure was [such] that they could be more pro-active), and I’d persuaded them all to put on some sort of workshop that would start the next week, so you could stand up at the end of the concert and say ‘if you liked that, just come back next week and you can do… something’. [There were] different ones in different places, and the response to that, especially from the schools, 185 was just fantastic. That’s where it all sort of started, that idea of a twin track. Trying to inspire people with a performance, and then bring the opportunity to participate as close as possible to point of inspiration. That was the initial thinking.

The ‘Twin Track’, as Anderson called it, entailed the setting a spark of inspiration with a world class performance, and then fuelling the resulting enthusiasm with the kindling of regular participation events in the area, all in the hope of lighting the permanent, independent flame of a local folk scene. This was to prove the cornerstone of Folkwork’s mission: to inspire and enable in equal measure. In the aftermath of that first tour, a legacy of weekly workshops in those areas was established, run by local folk musicians, several of which ran for a number of years after the tour. At the time of writing, the descendent of at least one such workshop is still in operation: the Redheughers ceilidh band, led by Robin Dunn, still runs a monthly ceilidh club in Gateshead once per month, and offers semi regular opportunities for new members to join the collective. 1987 saw another tour, this time by Scottish folk musicians-cum-children’s comedy entertainers ‘The Singing Kettle’, and also the beginning of another staple of Folkwork’s later educational approach: the One Day Workout.

The initial workout day was aimed at improving and intermediate musicians (mostly attendees of previous workshops), with professional tutors offering an intensive day of teaching to approximately one hundred and thirty children and a further thirty adults. This formula— partly inspired by Jay Ungar ‘s week-long Fiddle Fever workshops in New York which Alistair had taught at previously— was to remain in place for future events, with the aim of ten to fifteen tutors providing an inspirational day of music tuition for between two and three hundred participants each time. Absolute Beginner Workout Days were brought in to provide a starting point for people to experience making folk music for themselves. By 1988, as the movement gathered pace, the workload of the teaching initiatives was beginning to impinge on Anderson’s ability to earn a living as a performing and touring musician. What were needed were a dedicated administrator, an experienced fundraiser, an effective publicist and somebody to handle the logistical side of the touring and workshop schedule. That one person was on hand to ably fulfill all of these roles was the final component needed to launch Folk works: that person was Ros Rigby. Rigby had initially trained as a ballet dancer, but by 1988 she had already gained more than a decade of hands on experience of arts administration in the North East, having worked as Community Development Officer in Peterlee before taking on the role of Arts Development Manager for Gateshead Council: the first post of its kind in North of England. Under her leadership, the arts team had grown from three to ten personnel, reflecting the increasing store the both council and regional arts funding bodies were

186 beginning to set by the folk arts, as both a resource for the local population and a way of raising the region’s profile nationally. In this vein, under Rigby’s guidance, Gateshead’s Caedmon Hall gained a national reputation as a venue for Folk music, and a folk artist in residence had been appointed: Eddie Upton, later of Folk Southwest, was to stay in that post for three years.

Together, Anderson and Rigby put together a three-year development plan for a dedicated folk arts development agency, and took the proposal to Northern Arts. The bid was accepted, and Folkworks was born. Anderson and Rigby were placed as equal partners and co-directors of the organisation, which was both registered charity and a non profit making company limited by guarantee, with a board of directors that included and from a folk music background, as well as the MP for Gateshead East, the directors of Beamish Museum and Bainbridge’s department store, and chaired by John McElroy of Northern Electric.21 With an annual operating budget of just twenty thousand pounds, and an office in Black Swan Court just off Newcastle’s busy Westgate road, Folkworks initially only had Rigby as full time staff, with two or three days per week from Anderson, and part time administrative support for event co-ordination from Pam Hobson. The work continued apace, and by mid 1991 the subjects of the workout days had included a wide selection of folk instruments, dancing (Morris, Clog and Social) and dedicated events focussed specifically on fiddle or song. The tutors were from the top tier of the UK folk scene at the time, and aside from Anderson himself, had included England’s Martin Carthy and John Kirkpatrick of Brass Monkey fame, Scotland’s Shetland fiddle star Aly Bain and singer Ray Fisher, Irish piper Liam O’Flynn of , vocal ensemble Sisters Unlimited and virtuoso guitarist Chris Newman.

The combination of people, experience, location and timing, together with the critical mass of the pair’s prior work in the field, was to provide the perfect combination for success. Anderson had a reputation for making things happen after the Southbank seasons, and was also a highly visible representative of folk music nationally, having been in the High Level Ranters until 1979, gained a reputation as a composer in addition to keeping up a hectic solo touring schedule: he had also appeared on TV in the BBC’s Champion String Band television show, and in 1991 appeared in a promotional pop video for Kate Bush’s release of ‘Rocket Man’, an cover which peaked at number twelve in the UK charts. Rigby had not only the necessary expertise to promote and sustain Folkworks, but also the local contacts

21 Martin Nield, ‘Making Folk Work’, FolkRoots, 94/10 (April 1991), 31-33, (33). 187 needed to leverage her abilities. As David Oliver (later to become Folkworks’ Education Officer) was keen to stress, the pairing of Rigby and Anderson was absolutely necessary to drive Folkworks forward:

I just thought what Alistair and Ros were doing was inspiring. It was a magical combination … but the complimentary skills and talents and energies of those two people were absolutely critical: Both were needed. It’s a bit liked a railway train: Engine and carriages are both useful, [but] only if they’re together. So Ros brought this experience of Arts administration at a fairly senior level—brilliant organiser, superb manager of people, excellent at detailed planning as well as seeing the big picture. And likewise, Alistair could see the big picture, had vision, which I define as seeing what isn’t . Loads of people have imitated Folkworks, but they saw it when it didn’t exist. That’s the vision. And seeing the big picture— how things could be changed locally, regionally, nationally and internationally— but absolutely understanding down to the fine detail how it works. Down to bits of blue-tack, down to notices placed in specific positions on workshop days to make people feel comfortable and welcome and at ease.22

It seems that Rigby and Anderson were well aware of how unique their partnership and situation was. As the success of the organisation grew, Northern Arts were keen to begin franchising a Folkworks model nationwide, but it was agreed that there was no way to replicate their success simply by cloning the business elsewhere. Anderson’s recollection of the decision was: ‘we decided that really wasn’t the way, that each region needed to have something that responded to what was right for them, and that whoever was running it locally should follow their passions, as it were’. Interviewed by FolkRoots magazine back in 1991, Rigby was keen to deliver the same cautionary message: ‘Success in this game is very dependent on personalities and local conditions. There is no blueprint for everyone’.23 By the time they were to feature in that article, their annual budget had quadrupled, and the title of the article—‘Making Folk Work: Martin Nield Uncovers a Success Story in the North East of England’— spoke volumes about the positivity, energy and growth of the organisation: helping this success was another of the cornerstones of Folkworks' practice had been now been put in place: The Summer Schools.

The Folkwork’s Summer Schools began in 1989, initially providing four days of intensive, residential tuition to teenagers and young adults, although first adult and then junior categories were introduced a few years later. The tutors were to be the best musicians available, to provide the most inspirational experience possible, continuing with the theme of

22 David Oliver interviewed on 19/10/10, hereafter referred to as DO Interview. 23 Nield, 1991, 32. 188 twin track development: in the 1991 interview, Alistair stated that ‘We do not compromise on the quality of the tutors involved in these courses… the youngsters deserve the best, and the results have been very exciting’.24

But that idea that I had, that if I could be inspired by this having known nothing about it, there is no reason why any other kid couldn’t. There’s no reason why all kids should, I don’t suppose in the most idealized village with the greatest band back a hundred years ago, I don’t suppose everybody liked it then. But I just had so much experience of kids enjoying it that I thought this was worth doing. So that’s what we did.

Continuing with the education drive, regular Folkworks’ schools projects began in 1989/1990, with a list of seven schools in Northumberland receiving weekly visits from a team of tutors including Alistair, the Dunn brothers, a clog dancer named Jane Vipond and Sandra Kerr (whose contribution to the book Folk Music In Schools was discussed in the previous chapter). The work was firmly based on practical participation from the students themselves, with singing groups, dance clubs, ceilidh bands and instrument specific classes all featured in the activities taught. The culmination of the project was a grand concert in the seaport town of Blyth in Northumberland: around two hundred pupils performed from across the seven schools. Again, the legacy of the work was of paramount importance to Folkworks, with Rigby confirming in the FolkRoots magazine interview that many of the initiatives continued after the project ended, singling out the tin whistle clubs as particularly successful in this regard.25

Having turned down the franchise offer from Northern Arts, Folkworks was under pressure to increase the scale and frequency of its national touring operation, supported as ever by accompanying workshop series. Folkworks accepted this brief on the proviso that funding would be forthcoming to bring in a dedicated education specialist to oversee the sustain and growth of their schools programmes, summer residentials and workout days.26 Accordingly, in 1993 a part time, one-year contract for an education officer was advertised to trial the idea. The result was another extremely experienced, able and well-connected appointment: David Oliver went on to hold the post until 2009. Oliver had previously done some project work for Folkworks, starting by teaching an absolute beginners accordion workout day. Although an accomplished folk musician and experienced ceilidh player, the unique strength Oliver brought to the role was his background in education: he had spent the previous five years as

24 Nield, 1991, 33. 25 Idem. 26 AA Interview. 189 the head teacher. By his own admission, this had been a stressful position, and had left him exhausted and demoralised: the political climate in the local area had been difficult to navigate and there had been a major fire at the school, amongst other difficulties. Negotiating a year’s unpaid leave from his Headship (essentially taking an eighty percent pay cut), in September 1993 he joined the Folkworks team. By the Christmas holiday, he had decided to make the move permanently. Recalling the surprising ease of the decision, he was matter-of- fact:

I didn’t even think about it! I became Folkwork’s education director. I think it was good for them that they got someone not only with a lot of actual down-to-earth experience of folk music in an educational context, but also somebody with management experience at a fairly high level. I don’t think, when they advertised for nine thousand pound a year, they expected to get a high school head teacher, but it was a good time for me to do it.27

Anderson’s appraisal of the appointment reflects Oliver’s own, stressing the importance once again of strong local connections:

It was just fantastic when David decided he’d had enough being a very highly paid, highly stressed headmaster… I still see people from Whitley Bay who say, “You took the best Headmaster we ever had away from us!”. He was very good, and very loved in Whitley Bay. It was great, because he knew the other head teachers all around the County, and also he had that experience of working with kids in so many different situations.

Throughout the 1990s, Folkworks continued with their touring programme, notably bringing in international acts who may otherwise not have been able to appear in the UK, such as Irish super group Altan and American dance troupe The Fiddle Puppets.28 Schools, workouts and residential workshops remained central to their strategy. There was a major new, long-term development on the horizon, however: In the mid 1990s, Folkworks entered talks with the Northern Sinfonia and other interested parties, discussing the possibility for a regional music centre and world class concert venue in the North East region. Work began on the site in the early 2000s, on the South bank of the River Tyne opposite Newcastle’s quayside district, but delays led to the opening being held back until 2004. Folkworks and Northern Sinfonia became integrated into the North Music Trust in 2002, effectively ending their autonomy. Although key staff were transferred to equivalent roles within the new organization, and ongoing project work was continued throughout the change over, the profile of Folkworks

27 DO Interview. 28 Nield, 1991, 33. 190 was subsumed by the much larger organization. A list of some of the more prominent work undertaken by Folkworks during the 1990s and into the years of integration appears below. Although far from complete, it paints a useful picture of the organization’s activities during that era, especially as a detailed history of Folkworks is otherwise unavailable at the time of writing

The National Garden Festival, which was held from May to October 1990 in a formerly derelict riverside area Gateshead, featured a massive input from Folkworks.29 For every single day of the sixth month long festival, which was held on a two hundred acre, one and a half mile long stretch of the Tyne’s south bank, four or five live folk acts were booked. Although competing with a monorail, a giant Ferris wheel, Jet-ski racing, vintage car competitions as well as myriad floral displays and art installations, the constant presence of local traditional music at the event was a major profile raiser, both for Folkworks and Folk arts in the region, as over three million visitors had been drawn to the event. Unfortunately, the only footage I have been able to locate of the event shows very little of the music (focusing almost entirely on the transport infrastructure), but a trio of clogdancers, a player and a northwest clog side are visible, albeit briefly.30

Making Music On The Line was a millennium educational project, which was run in collaboration between Folkworks, Oxfam and . The idea was to link five regions on the same meridian line: Northumberland, (England) the Shetland Isles (North of Scotland), Gascony (France), Catalonia (Spain) and Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), with each region providing two professional musicians to create a pool of ten players. Initially based in Hexham, the cohort learned three pieces of music, by ear, from each locale before travelling to each region in turn and working with local children to perform celebratory concerts in every country. Over ten thousand children are believed to have been involved across the five countries.31 According to Oliver who along with Sandra Kerr formed the Northumbrian contingent, there was also an element of teacher training involved in each: between thirty and forty schoolteachers from each region all told.32

29 Nield, 1991, 33. 30 Lesley Oldfield, ‘Watch Gateshead Garden Festival videos 25 years on and share your pictures & memories’, ChronicleLive, http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/history/watch-gateshead-garden-festival-videos-9041544, 13/05/2015. (04/01/2016). 31 Fleur Griffiths, Supporting Children’s Creativity through Music, Dance, Drama and Art: Creative conversations in the Early Years (London: Routledge, 2012), 105. 32 DO Interview. 191 Fiddles on Fire was initially a one off tour in 1991, featuring an international cast of fiddle players including Nashville Bluegrass session ace Mark O’Connor, Ireland’s Paddy Glackin, Shetlander Willy Hunter and the Swedish duo of Ellika Frisell and Mats Eden. As was the practice at the time, it was tied to another workout weekend, this time in Billingham, Northumberland.33 At the time of writing, the name is still used for the Sage’s annual Fiddles on Fire festival, of which 2015 was the sixth: a weekend of concerts and fiddle workshops in Gateshead, as well as twinned Folkworks curated events at King’s Place in central London.

Full House was a teacher training project sponsored by Newcastle Building Society, drawing in over one hundred teachers representing all thirteen of the region’s educational authorities, for a series of training weekends held at Ridley Hall, Northumberland. Beginning in 1996, the emphasis was on enthusing the staff with an atypical training programme that swapped ceilidhs and clog dancing for the usual show presentations. Interestingly, even in this setting, direct guidance as to how to teach was not given, according to Oliver’s recollections:

There were workshops from Sandra Kerr and Alex Fisher (great clog dance teacher), Alistair and me. Workshops, but always linking it into a social context: the session, the sing around, the ceilidh. We never ever said, during those training weekends, we never said ‘this is what you must do with the children’ we just gave the teachers a good time and good songs, good tunes, good dances—good resources —and they would adapt them and use them in their schools as appropriate. … What we produced were teachers who were happy. Happy people, confident and enthusiastic: those three things. If you give children in schools teachers who are happy people, who are confident and enthusiastic about what they’re doing, then its great for the children. Full house did produce that.

Schools Projects, such as a major Sainsbury’s sponsored event in the early 1990s: ten secondary schools gained a folk artist in residence as a result of that initiative.34 Later events included a major folk dance project in schools in Wallsend, which culminated in a huge outdoor ceilidh event on Performance Square in Gateshead.35

The BBC 2 Radio Young Folk Award was partially run by Folkworks, in conjunction with the Mike Harding folk show for a number of years, although the association was ended shortly after the opening of the Sage, with 2006 being the only year in which the awards were to take place in the building (the winners that year were a Scottish band called Bodega).

33 Nield, 1991, 33. 34 DO Interview. 35 Playing guitar for this ceilidh was my second official Folkworks booking. 192 Several bands made up of Folkworks alumni have won the award since its inception, including 422 in 1999, Last Orders in 2007 and Moore, Moss, Rutter in 2010.

Folkestra (initially titled FolkESTRA North) is a youth folk orchestra originally founded and directed by Kathryn Tickell. Founded in 2001, it came under the Folkworks aegis after the NMT integration and opening of the Sage Gateshead. Differing from what had previously been the norm for Folkworks practice, the fifteen or so available places for performers were gained by audition, with participants then paying a substantial fee for each year’s membership (although some bursaries were available). After 2008, the Head of Learning & Participation cited Folkestra’s appearance at in the Albert Hall as a major indicator of the success of Folkworks, although it could be argued that this showed an incomplete understanding of what Folkworks had set out to achieve.36 In 2016/2017, the group will be directed by longstanding Folkworks tutor Ian Stephenson, with an annual payable fee of £850 per musician to participate.

4.4 Folkworks and Teaching Style: “In Comes I…”37

My arrival in the North East, leaving the Midlands to study folk music at degree level at Newcastle University, was in September 2005: the Sage Gateshead had opened the previous December, and Folkworks was already fully integrated into the wider North Music Trust. Alistair Anderson, David Oliver and Stewart Hardy all taught on my degree course, and most of our practical classes took place in the Music Education Centre (MEC). When the degree programme was first established, Folkworks had been a partner; although official link between them and the University course had been dissolved before I arrived, there was still a good deal of co-operation between the two: if nothing else, Folkworks staff worked only two floors above us. Some of my fellow students had grown up at going to the Summer Schools; one had even come up through a school that had an extensive Folkworks input, which he credited inspiring him to study folk music at degree level. Despite this, my personal awareness of the history of the organization was limited, and I had never attended a Folkworks educational event of any kind: I had witnessed Alistair Anderson teaching, having learned from him first hand during our Ensemble modules and in some history lectures, but

36 This claim was repeated in the documents written to advertise for a student to take up a collaborative doctoral award between Newcastle University and North music Trust, with NMT’s portion of the copy written by then L&P director Katherine Zesserson. Ultimately, that collaboration was to became this thesis. 37 “In Comes I…” is the traditional entry cry when a character in a Mumming play introduces themselves to the stage. It seemed fitting for my own re-entry into the narrative. 193 never in his role of the organisation’s Artistic Director. Folkworks was all around me, but I couldn’t really see it, for the same reason people standing at Grey’s Monument can’t see Newcastle.

My own personal experience of teaching for Folkworks began as a guitar tutor on an Absolute Beginners Workout Day in Spring 2007.38 Despite being already integrated in to North Music Trust, the booking process was still relatively informal: a phone call from Sarah Barnard, the Folkworks Project Coordinator at the time, was all it took to book me. As we were both at least partially based in the Sage Gateshead, a quick meeting in the building’s café to discuss details was the only other contact made beforehand, lasting only the time it took to drink a cup of coffee apiece. They knew that I had been both a private and a peripatetic guitar teacher for a number of years prior to moving north to take up my studies, and had recommendations from people who had worked with me, but nobody from Folkworks had ever witnessed me teaching: I was booked on word-of-mouth reputation. There was no guidance as to what material I should teach, or how I should go about teaching it; the aim of the day was to have a group of complete beginners able to play a complete piece of music, as an ensemble, by the time of a sharing session at the end of the day: so long as they could show this progress to the other groups by the end of the day, what I actually taught was my own issue. I had three sessions that day to achieve this goal, each around one and a half hours.

In the event, I chose to teach a simple Morris dance tune called ‘Shepherd’s Hey’, chosen as it has no really complex rhythms and contains repetitive patterns of notes; being a Morris tune, it can be played authentically at a slow and manageably steady pace. More importantly, it can be accompanied with only three chords, which I believed to be an achievable number of chord shapes for a complete beginner to master cleanly (without choking any of the notes) in a single session. The chord shapes informed the key I would teach the tune in: A Major’s three native major chords can all be played using only three fingers, using some open strings to facilitate this, so A was the key I chose. The plan was to introduce them to the instrument and learn some chord shapes in the first session, learn to play the melody after the coffee break, and then use the session after lunch to consolidate what we had covered before the sharing session. To this end, I drew up some large chord diagrams for A, D and E, wrote out the melody in both standard notation and guitar tablature (again in large print), drew up a diagram

38 The hard drive on which the information regarding the exact date, fee and expected pupil numbers for this event was stored was unfortunately destroyed by a power surge the following winter. Having been arranged by phone and in person, there is no email trail. I believe it to have been in April, during the school Easter holidays. 194 of the guitar with the principle individual components clearly labeled, and made sure to arrive with enough time to get them photocopied.

As it turned out, my class was larger than had been expected, reaching over twenty participants due to walk-up sales on the day, and also included a ukulele, a mandolin and a tenor banjo. We were moved from our originally allotted room to the Northern Rock Foundation Hall; a large, wood paneled, high-ceilinged space designed to allow the entire Northern Sinfonia to rehearse in stage formation, it seats approximately two hundred when configured as a concert venue. Whilst it is an excellent performance space, it quickly became apparent that the size and resonance of the room was proving intimidating to my students, many of them having never played an instrument before. A hasty re-arrangement of the seating, and I had them sitting in a semicircle, facing into one of the corners where I positioned myself: the aim was to limit the sense of overbearing size. Leaving the whole class to briefly practice each new element allowed me to quickly write up equivalent chord charts for the other instruments so they could participate on equal terms, and I used the coffee break to write up mandolin and banjo tablature for the melody. By the end of the day, the group was able to perform an ensemble piece, with some playing the melody, some strumming or fingerpicking the chords, and the feedback was positive. When I questioned how they had known that I could play ukulele, mandolin and banjo, I was told that they had not know, but they did know that I would cope. At the time, I was mildly annoyed by this, but on reflection, they had not been wrong. Without being aware of it, my very first experience of working for Folkworks had mirrored what I would later hear from Anderson, Oliver and Hardy: Select competent, flexible staff and let them work in whatever way suited them best. Over the following two years, I was asked to cover classes for tutors on the Caedmon Folk course a number of times, whether song classes or guitar groups.

After taking on the Ph.D, I found myself teaching under the Folkworks aegis faster than I had anticipated. In 2009 Anderson had departed the organization, replaced as Artistic Director by Kathryn Tickell, and Oliver, whilst still taking on work in Folkworks projects, had transferred to self-employment in 2007: he was to retire toward the end of 2009. Officially, these departures were amicable, but the internal tensions inside the Sage were clear. One bone of contention was the cancellation of the long running Caedmon Folk programme, which North Music Trust management had deemed too expensive (staff were paid far more per hour than project musicians in other programmes within the organization). When the organization re- launched their evening folk classes as ‘Folkworks Tuesdays’ I was asked to be on the much-

195 reduced team of tutors. This was a rapid renegotiation of my obligations to North Music Trust as part of my Ph.D, as the suggested time investment took up all of my allotted time with the organization, and I was only given a couple of hours to make the decision: a phone call mid afternoon that needed a definite answer by five. A hasty telephone conversation with my supervisor followed, after which I agreed, with some trepidation: I was not to be paid, as my stipend was deemed to cover this time already. As quickly as that, I was a Folkworks Tuesday tutor, with a new case study on my hands. Aside from the Strand Leader, there were four of us, all graduates from the Newcastle University Folk and Traditional music degree programme. The classes I was assigned were a harmony vocal group and a new kind of class: a mixed instrument, catch-all group called simply fretted strings. The former I had plenty of relevant experience for—both through my ongoing work with Stream of Sound and having covered for Caedmon song classes— but the latter had not been attempted before, and would require careful planning. Meetings were held in which the new pay structure was explained, and the co-mentoring initiative was introduced through a workshop (although no further mention of it was made after the initial meeting). What was not offered was any guidance as to what we should teach, or how we should teach it. After the first term, there was a request that all tutors include some local North East repertoire in the next term’s classes, although no particular pieces or percentages of the total taught repertoire were ever discussed, nor were there any consequences for non-compliance ever implied: as I already included local material, this meant no change to my established practice. This is not to imply that there were no checks and balances in place; tutors were obliged to allow the strand leader or other senior staff member to observe them working upon request, and certain weeks in each term were set aside for cohort-wide observations As my own work was always considered to be satisfactory, I cannot attest to what recommendations might have been made if a teacher had not met with management approval: none of my fellow tutors ever spoke of coming under censure, although the awareness that they were being observed was sometimes resented.

There were certain assumptions in place as to the way a class would be laid out and administered however, some of which came from the wider cultural expectations of the Sage’s staff. The chairs for the class were always set up in advance by the support team at the Sage’s Music Education Centre (MEC), and were invariably arranged in a circle, with no music stands within the circle, on the assumption that all classes would run that way. The team worked from a set of instructions issued from the company’s logistics software (Artifax), although I was never able to establish who had made the decision that folk classes should always be set up in a circle. In the event, my fretted string class was too large to

196 effectively run in one big circle; with over twenty participants, those on the far side of the circle found it harder to hear me, and those to my immediate found it hard to see my fretting hand unless I was turned especially toward them, which entailed turning my back on the students to my right. In response, I re-arranged the class into two concentric semicircles with a music stand per pair. Despite repeated requests to change the set up instructions, and even long after the instructions were altered, the room was still set up in a circle. When I asked a member of the support team, he replied that folk classes were always in a circle, as if it were an incontrovertible constant. It took until my third term teaching that class to effect the change I asked for, so ingrained was the expectation that ‘folk = circle’ and, by extension, folk is informal and nobody who will be there can read music.

The other assumption was that the preparation for the classes would generate paperwork in the form of lyrics, sheet music or similar. Reading music was not a requirement to join any of the classes however, so by implication students who learned by ear also needed to be catered for. For the song class, I made the choice to teach as much by ear as possible, only ever providing notation after a song had been learned; I did provide sheets of lyrics, as memorizing more than a rhyming couplet was challenging for some of my participants. Warm up exercises, rounds and nonsense songs were never notated. By contrast, the sheer number of different types of instrument in the fretted strings group meant that watching my hands was only of use to players of whichever instrument I had in my hands at the time; I usually worked from an acoustic guitar, plus either a mandolin, or soprano ukulele, switching instruments as necessary to suit the class, but even within this flexibility, I could only ever play one instrument at a time. In an effort to provide extra visual support for the class, I provided extensive notation options, often producing six or seven different sheets of music per class. The usual complement was standard notation plus chords (in large print), dual standard and tablature notation sheets for each specific instrument (usually for guitar, 5 string banjo in G tuning, mandolin/tenor banjo on the same sheet as the tablature is shared, Appalachian dulcimer, and sometimes ukulele), plus any harmony parts or counter melodies. That the same teacher could employ these two extremes on the same evening serves to further illustrate that there were no hard and fast rules about what was taught or how it was delivered, just that it should be effective and appropriate.

When the decision was taken to introduce a training strand to the Folkworks’ Tuesdays, by which current students on the Folk and Traditional Music degree programme At Newcastle University could be introduced as potential future tutors via serving an apprenticeship-like

197 training period, I assumed formal instruction would be provided as part of this initiative. However, the way the system was implemented was that the trainees were essentially assigned to act as classroom assistants to the existing tutors, learning by observing the class in action, rotated round between classes roughly monthly. There was no time allotted to discuss what would be taught that evening, why it had been chosen or what role the trainee was to have in the teaching of it; whilst I chose to offer my free time to any trainee working alongside me who wanted to go through that process, most chose not to take advantage of it. The traineeship produced a number of excellent tutors for the programme going forward, and the majority of those who took part are still involved in folk music education in some form in their respective areas of the country. However, once again they had learned without any direct instruction, but from by watching tutors who had themselves had received no formal training from the organization. I was not only teaching for Folkworks, but I was teaching Folkworks teachers to teach, all without feeling as if I knew what Folkworks teaching actually was.

4.5 Observation: Folkworking

My first attempt to observe a more experienced Folkworks tutor in action had been turned down: the individual in question had refused to have an observer in their class, as they felt it would alter the mood. By the time the next opportunity arose, I had been teaching on Folkworks Tuesday for almost three months. The event in question was Absolute Beginners Day, to be held on March 27th 2010 at Alington House: a rambling and slightly unkempt 17th century former guardhouse, now used as a Community Association building, located on the winding North Bailey, next to the city’s imposing Cathedral and Castle complex. Sitting in with the accordion tutor and his six beginners was to be my day’s work, and I took extensive notes and made some audio recordings of the session. Over the following week, I wrote the day up as a lengthy piece of thick description, over ten thousand words, with the intention of pouring over every last detail, but reading it back several years later, the description of the first few minutes of the class is actually the most revealing:

The six participants, Lou (the teacher) and I file into our allotted room, which is quite small considering the size of the group – certainly no bigger than the living room of my Tyneside flat.39 It looks as if it is normally used as a kindergarten or crèche – a curtain on the wall opposite the door is partially drawn over a large frieze painting of characters from children’s books, and the raised area at the far end has an assortment of early years toys and books

39 All names in this extract have been changed. 198 piled up on it, as well as several old fashioned wooden school desks. The wall to the left of the door appears to be a recent and temporary edition, suggested by the unfinished chipboard and the sizeable gap at the top between it and the ceiling. There is no natural light, so a single uncovered bulb is our only source of illumination, making the room seem dim in comparison to the bright sunshine of the day: an impression which is not helped by the dark carpet and deep green of the walls.

The participants arrange themselves on a semi-circle of chairs towards the back of the room, and several begin to unpack their loaned instruments. Most of them appear to be nervous, and they talk to each other in near whispers. Lou pulls a chair up facing them, whilst I position myself as unobtrusively as possible in such a confined space, in the corner by the door. As Lou unpacks his accordion, he introduces himself, and suggests that they go round the circle introducing themselves to the group, and tell everyone if they have ever played this or any other instrument before, and whether they read music at all.

The gentleman immediately to Lou’s left has brought his own accordion (a big, slightly worse for wear looking 128 bass German instrument), and introduces himself as Rolph: he is an avid collector of musical instruments, and likes to learn how to play each new acquisition a little. Of the group, he seems the most comfortable holding the accordion already, and I surmise that he has spent some time familiarising himself with it beforehand. Next to him is Karen. Neither she, nor her friend Kitty next to her, have ever played an instrument before, but as recent folk ‘converts’ they both quite fancied having a try. Roseanne is sat next to Kitty and directly opposite Lou. She reads music a little, but has never played accordion before. To her left, Neville and Elspeth both also read to some extent, although the accordion is new to them too. I take this opportunity to introduce myself and say a little about why I’m there, and that they should feel free to ignore me for the rest of the day. “Ok then” says Rolph, and turns away from me in an exaggerated fashion, making the group laugh.

Lou encourages them to get their instruments out of the cases, and begins to show them how to strap on and hold them. The group shuffle about on their chairs, trying to get used to the unfamiliar weight and bulk of the instrument, tentatively pressing keys and buttons, and trying to move the bellows. Lou starts to explain how the instrument works, demonstrating how the keyboard side works like a piano by playing a scale up and down….

199 This extract demonstrates a very different atmosphere to my own first encounter teaching at an Absolute Beginners Day. Firstly, the class size was much smaller, allowing everybody present to be on first name terms from the outset, and eye contact could be made with every other participant as well as the teacher. The room was not only more intimate but also a less formal in aspect; with its stacks of chairs and desks, it felt more like a childhood den, and there was no view in to the room from outside: a far cry from the glass fronted concert hall I had first experienced. The group was nervous, but in this homely setting they joked, questioned, interacted, struggled and triumphed together as the day went on. The tune they learned—a Tyneside favourite called ‘Jaimie Allen’—was almost irrelevant, and the teaching was largely reactive to the individual’s needs within the group: sometimes working one-on- one, or in pairs as necessary, but always supportive and responsive. It was warm, friendly, fun, and above all it felt like a safe space to take the risk of trying something new in. In the breaks, the students mingled over sandwiches or coffee, discussing their progress, the tutors, and the role that music played in their lives. The low ceilinged, cramped and labyrinthine nature of the building meant that the gatherings were small and intimate. I spoke to the Strand Leader after the event about how different it felt, and they confirmed what I had come to suspect: the location had been chosen precisely because it didn’t feel like a world-class concert venue.

The following August, I requested to observe the Summer Schools: this was granted, so long as I was prepared to be a spare pair of hands if needed. I was to be based at the youth event, which was located in ‘Hild & ’, one of Durham University’s residential colleges, between the 9th to 14th of August 2010: Adult and Junior Summer Schools were similarly housed in other colleges around the city. It had a several large residential blocks, a sports- cum-concert hall, a bar area for those of age, and numerous smaller classrooms situated around the college buildings, which formed a loose horse shoe shape when viewed from the river. Over the first few days, I went in to as many different youth classes as I could, mostly just observing and taking notes, but joining in or supporting individual students if the tutor requested it. Observing different teachers at work during the week of that Summer School only served to reinforce an idea that had increasingly taken hold since watching that accordion class and continuing teaching in between, namely that there simply was no set methodology for teaching in place at Folkworks. The following three examples each demonstrated radically different approaches to teaching within the same residential setting, each aimed a very similar demographic.

200 In the advanced fiddle class, the tutor hardly spoke. As the students sat down in a circle, he played a tune through twice: a performance, not simply a rehearsal. Upon finishing, he played the first phrase slowly, and motioned for the class to play it back to him. Once they had responded, he played it again, but emphasizing a note that not all the class had managed to replicate correctly. Once they had mastered this phrase, he moved on to the next, highlighting alterations he wished the class to make by leaning on a certain note or exaggerating a particular inflection until the whole tune was mastered. Once the class had played the tune through as he wished them to three consecutive times, he place in fiddle in his lap, and waited for silence. Only then, after nearly half an hour of communicating entirely through his fiddle and his body language, did he speak: explaining what the tune was called and where it came from. They played the tune again, and then a new one was introduced in the same manner as the first. The higher ability level of this advanced class meant that they all had the requisite level of ear training to respond to this method, and the intensity of the session was entirely appropriate for the players present. At the end of the session, the participants packed up and left quietly, as if trying to hold onto the feeling of the lesson a while longer.

The guitar tutor, by contrast, had a mixed ability group, and chose to assert his control frequently; the main method was by teaching them that if he played a certain riff, the class were to respond verbally and then be quiet. Having previously only witnessed such control mechanisms in primary school teaching, I was initially somewhat taken aback to see teenagers taught in this way, but they seemed to respond to it in good humour. In fairness to the tutor in question, it was a large group with a varying attention span, and they had been assigned a cramped space; this was, however, the only use of such a technique that I saw in any Folkworks setting. The teaching was punctuated by very detailed verbal explanations what was to be done next, and critiques of each attempt afterwards. My observation was cut short, as the tutor asked me to take two of the less technically adept students out into the corridor to catch them up to the rest of the class, which took up the remainder of the time: the group worked at a very fast pace. This observation took place on the same day as the fiddle class detailed above, and the contrast between the two was extreme: one delivered with music-as- communication, the other primarily by repeated verbal re-enforcement.

The most impressive and effective folk arts teaching I have ever witnessed took place in an elective, one off taster session after the lunch break one afternoon. The occasion was an introduction to the North East pit village tradition of dancing. The ‘swords’ in question are in fact a strip of spring steel approximately an inch wide and two feet long, with

201 a handle at each end: generally one of these handles is fixed, whilst the other can swivel freely. Traditionally, teams of five dancers perform a series increasingly complex of twisting, interlocking figures whilst each holds one handle of a sword in each hand, with their immediate neighbours to left and right holding the other end of each sword: they only let go to form the ceremonial sword ‘lock’ or star of all the swords at the end of a dance, which is held aloft before the team leave the performance space.40 The tutor, an experienced dancer who ran an award winning side, had brought four sets of swords with him, and instructed his twenty students to stand in circles of five, all holding swords as described above. From here, each new dance figure was set as a problem solving exercise, with the only rule being that the students were not allowed to let go of the swords as they tried to work out a way to reach the positions they had been assigned. Much hilarity and falling over ensued, during which the single instructor was able to move from group to group offering close assistance without the other circles having to stand idle. If a dancer let go, the group started again. Over the course of an hour, four or five different maneuvers were accomplished by all of the groups, despite the near constant laughter and occasional tangles of bodies; the group had immense fun (at one point an entire circle collapsed to the floor laughing) and also learned many of the basic tenets of a new dance form.

Almost all of the teaching that I witnessed during that week was clearly effective and well conceived, but there were very few generalizations that could be made beyond that.41 The three examples I have chosen to illustrate this diversity of style are different enough as to be distinct teaching methods in their own right, yet all were perfectly fitting within the wide umbrella of Folkworks tuition. The teaching was not the only aspect of the week that was of interest, however. The sheer excitement in the air at the Youth event was palpable, and never seemed to let up. During free time, sessions sprang up around the campus, tunes were swapped, bands were formed and the sound of music carried on into the night, often to the despair of the pastoral team who were attempting to enforce a curfew. As an experience for the participants, the formal tuition was only half of the experience: these meetings of minds and musics, conducted with all the social intensity that enthusiastic teenagers can muster, were every bit as important. Being able to socialize and play music informally with their

40 More detailed descriptions of Rapper, and footage of the tradition in action, can be found at the website of one of Newcastle’s award winning sides: The Newcastle Kingsmen, who formed in 1949. http://www.kingsmen.co.uk/, (23/10/17). 41 The only exception was when one of the management staff attempted made an unscheduled and ultimately unsuccessful attempt teach the whole cohort a song that they had neglected to learn themselves. Their inconsistency made the song impossible to learn, and the students and staff alike were unimpressed, responding with little enthusiasm. The song was abandoned, and that particular manager made no further attempts to teach. This was the exception that proved the rule, however. 202 tutors was a prized experience. On several occasions, watching as a class finished, I saw queues of students forming, each wanting to catch a moment of personal, one-to-one time with their musical hero. David Oliver later summed up this particular aspect of the Summer School programme:

That’s really why it’s so important: the transformation of lives is unbelievable, the transforming effect of the youth summer schools. Its frightening, actually, when I think about it, how many peoples’ lives have been… you know, their parents tell me— these are kids who’ve got bright education, university careers ahead of them—this is the week they live for every year: the week at the summer school. Quite a lot of children go to schools where folk music is either ignored, or frowned upon, or even treated with contempt and there’s one kid in the school who loves it. At school they feel like a pariah, or they just hide it. [They] come to Durham [summer school], there’s a hundred and fifty youngsters all the same, all as passionate. How great is that for them? I think what the summer school has done (and other projects as well) for giving young people not only musical development but just development as people: self esteem, self respect, confidence, health (in its very biggest sense)… I don’t think I’m exaggerating here, I think its massively important.

This notion that the Summer Schools create an ersatz folk community to which musically isolated youth could belong was a major breakthrough in my thinking about the nature of Folkworks’s intervention. The Summer Schools present a haven for an idealized alternate lifestyle, in which all present share a common passion, and all effort is devoted to its betterment. For the rest of the year, the expectation of this summer session remains simmering under the surface of the everyday, waiting for the release of that one brief period to form a year’s worth of treasured memories. There are comparisons to be made here to medieval traditions such as the ‘ of Misrule’, in which the official order of the medieval world could be ritually up-ended during certain traditional gatherings. Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on the Carnivalesque explores these themes, and for him this secondary, concurrent potential reality was ever present alongside the ‘official truth’ of the enforced feudal order, and although remaining largely unacknowledged outside of the sanctioned festivals in which it was set free, this ‘people’s unofficial truth’ was almost licensed by its occasional ritualized outbreaks at specific times of the medieval year.42 Whilst Bakhtin’s theorizations are so closely tied to the work of Rabelais as to be almost impossible to fully disentangle, the broader notion of a parallel, alternative stream of reality with a specific period of release has remarkable resonance with the Folkworks Summer School experience: a period in which people act and dress differently, and in which the private passion of the remaining year becomes the public focus of the community they are immersed in. Folk festivals have a

42 Pam Morris (ed.), The Bakhtin Reader (London: Arnold, 2003), 206-210. 203 similar appeal, being another outlet for this dreamworld-made-temporarily-manifest, are well aware of this altering of perceptions amongst their clientele, and even market themselves accordingly: visitors to Towersey Festival are greeted by a giant hoarding which reads ‘Welcome To Another Lovelier World’.

One common factor between events such as Folkworks Summer Schools and larger folk festivals such as Towersey, or Sidmouth that serves to enhance this sense of otherworldliness is that they all exist only for a specific, short period of time each year, and outside of those times there is nothing about the places where they occur to betray their existence. If one were to visit the site of the Towersey festival outside of the month of August, for example, all that would be there to see is an unremarkable green field site near Haddenham & Tame Parkway station. Similarly, visiting Durham University college premises during term time would yield no hint of Folkworks ever having been there; though the buildings remain in place, there is no way to access the same experience. Like the magical vanishing traders of , gone without trace when the protagonists tries to return whatever enchantment they had unknowingly purchased, only combination of the right people, in the right place at the right time can make the occasion appear. Just as with Bakhtin’s notion that traditions of misrule were authorized to overwhelm the dominant social and cultural order only at pre-determined, ritual moments before sliding back from view, so too is the nature of the Summer School: only at the appointed time can the correct alignment of people, place and purpose bring it forth into being. Once done, that particular event can never be recreated: time has moved on, that exact group will never reconvene in that place again to make the same music again, and the idealized alternate social experience slips back behind the everyday.

Unsurprisingly, Folkworks events capitalize on this by making every effort to reinforce the participant’s sense of both ownership and situated uniqueness. The ‘Over To You’ concert, an evening in which the participants are given a stage to perform on, playing whatever material they choose, purely for each other’s enjoyment (it is not a public concert), reinforce the sense of the summer school being their space. This sense of collectivism is deliberately reinforced by the organization: all three of the Summer Schools—Adult, Youth and Junior run concurrently—are given a set of repertoire, referred to as ‘The Big Tunes’ which every participant learns, and the entire triple cohort performs them together at a combined, public showcase event at the end of the week, tying all three events together despite the different ages, abilities and locations of the respective events. Part of allowing the participants to own

204 the space was wrapped up in small details that were put in place before the event itself, and particularly in those that served to put the individuals at ease from the moment of arrival. In David Oliver’s estimation, this was a factor that both typified the feel of Folkworks events, and also set them apart from competitors:

This thing about sign posting— I learnt this from Ros [Rigby]. When people arrive for a day of workshops (because before the Sage Gateshead was here we used to hire a school or a college for a day of workshops) some of them will feel nervous. They’ll all have travelled some distance. What they need is to know where to go and what to do. So, if you arrive there and you don’t even know whether to turn left or right to go to reception, you actually feel either angry or stupid or frustrated, or a combination [of the three]. Some people feel inadequate, some people just feel irritated, some people think ‘Oh it doesn’t matter, I’ll find my way’, but y’know… just to arrive there and [be able to] say ‘Right! Reception this way! Fiddle workshops up the stairs and turn left…really good sign posting of venues is an example of the kind of attention to detail that came to characterise Folkworks. When you arrived at a Folkworks day you felt comfortable, relaxed, easy… and what a difference that makes to the way you go through the day! You start the day feeling confident, feeling relaxed, feeling that you’re being looked after and feeling that you matter as a person.

Signposting also stamps the presence of the organization onto the temporary venue, asserting their current ownership of that space. Although the Summer Schools are the most extreme example of the phenomenon described above, the Workout Days and even the weekly classes all exhibit this tendency to an extent. They are part of a wider projection of a Folkworks ethos, a set of values and expectations that surround the organization as a whole; rather than enforcing a rigid pedagogy, Folkworks events are surrounded by an expectational aura of positive, energetic, safe and empowering music making, within which the individual tutors operated as they saw fit to fulfill this implied promise. Details such as the signposting are employed as much to intercept potential impediments to making this ethos manifest as participant experience as they are for purely practical purpose.

If the defining character of a Folkworks project was actually in the surrounding details, the feel and energy of the classes and not focused on the actions of the teaching staff, then was there an underlying pedagogical framework? Asked directly about the nature of Folkworks’ pedagogical approach, Alistair Anderson was frank: it was not an issue they had focused on, at least in their earlier days. It was far more important to create the right atmosphere, and then allow his carefully chosen staff to operate as they saw fit:

That they [the students] would enjoy the experience [was the most important factor]. Because we were using lots of different people, and everybody had come to it from

205 different sorts of backgrounds, certainly in the early days there was no consistency of pedagogical approach at all. The essential [thing] was that they enjoyed the stuff. We used people who we felt had strong personalities, people like Ray Fisher to teach singing in those days. I mean, she’d walk into a class with a guitar and stuff and everybody’s going to clock it, because she’ got that sort of personality. And people with energy. Because a lot of us had learned from an older tradition… Ray Fisher sat for hours and hours with , I was with Billy Pigg, and by then I’d played literally thousands of hours with Taylor and Atkinson and Joe [Hutton]. But, we also all knew that that was a process which was much, much slower, it was an Osmotic process, and that actually with a class full of kids who had no experience of his stuff, certainly initially, there was no way you had that sort of time luxury to get things going and get them active. So we would all find ways of getting things to square one, past square one and on as quickly as possible, so that there was energy and vitality in the thing and the kids were drawn through. There was not a consistency of pedagogical approach at all. It was passion led, with experience drawn from a pretty wide range.

Once again, he stresses that the teachers’ personality is the driving force in communicating the music, passing on their own enthusiasm for the material by example; recalling his own ‘road to Damascus’ moment of the meeting with Billy Pigg, and the powerful inspiration he took from it, then trying to find ways in which to translate a similarly engaging encounter with folk music into a more time-condensed group environment. So long as the teachers had something to give, musically, then the nature of the giving was their own concern. One advantage to both allowing and encouraging the individual teachers to operate in uniquely personal styles was that it came across as a natural and uncontrived extension of that personality in a way that a more uniform and generalized lesson plan could never achieve. The idea that had taken hold during the second revival of the folk musician always acting as an ambassador for their culture been developed into an active stance: these were more akin musical missionaries, offering access to a culture which could be joined and made manifest wherever the seeds took root.

Not all of the tutors working under the umbrella of Folkworks had the opportunity of working alongside such figures as Pigg, Taylor and Atkinson. Many were just as inspired by the tutors they had met through attending Folkworks events, and by the mid 1990s a second generation of tutors was coming through, having been inspired in turn by Anderson and his team. Amongst the first to make that leap was Stewart Hardy, now a highly regarded performer, fiddle teacher, workshop leader and founder of the Tyneside Fiddle Alliance community project. He began attending Folkworks events at the very first Summer School in 1989, later becoming a regular tutor for Folkworks’ classes and workshops. He described the period of

206 approximately five years during which he went from his first time attending a Folkworks event to being a tutoring at them as being akin to lengthy training by observation:

‘There was no formal guidance, there was no formal training, but what there was, was that I’d gone on every Folkwork’s workshop that I possibly could. Y’know, it was a no brainer for me, pay ten quid for a days workshops with the current players, many of whom were good teachers. Not all, but many of [them]—the ones who kept getting asked back were good teachers! So your training, if you like, was observing them do their workshops and absorbing what [was] effective, and remembering what didn’t work for you, or those around you. It was more a passive training; training by observation, rather than ‘ok, we’re going to send you on a course now and teach you how to run a workshop’. But then equally, I think they’re not daft. On my first one they gave me the advanced fiddles, and the more advanced the musicians are (as long as they’re up for it and open minded) the easier they are to teach, ‘cause they kind of run themselves. So they gave me the easiest group to teach… There were good people around you, such as Catriona MacDonald and Chris Wood, so if you had any questions, they’d point you in the right direction.’43

Giving the less experienced tutor a more technically able class was simply another way of enabling an in for a more junior colleague, and of increasing the likelihood of a successful outcome. It was not just the newer staff that received such support, however. One story that Hardy related to me (which was also told a number of other times by informants) illustrates both the degree of idiosyncrasy of individual tutors, and also that Folkworks would back teaching decisions that were considered to be useful for the participants even if they were controversial at first. At a Youth Summer School in the mid 1990s (Hardy believed 1996) Chris Wood (of Wood & Cutting and the English Acoustic Collective) was teaching the advanced fiddle class, and instead of providing a slew of new repertoire as was customary, he chose to focus on one tune, namely ‘The Merry Blacksmith’, for the entire week. The class were, to quote Hardy, ‘on the verge of open rebellion’, but Wood stood firm, with Anderson’s whole-hearted approval. Wood had decided that the class were not in need of more ‘cool tunes’, but rather needed to learn how to ‘get inside’ a tune, really learning every tiny detail, every potential approach: the ‘corners’ of a tune, as players sometimes refer to such minutiae. David Oliver credited the arrival of Chris Wood and as having made a major impact on the Summer Schools, placing more emphasis on the ‘how’ of a tune, and Hardy claimed this incident as being inspirational in his own teaching practice.

It was not that Folkworks were not diligent in the planning of their events, but rather that the actual teaching approach was left to the individual style of the tutor. This does not imply that

43 Stewart Hardy, interviewed 11/11/10, hereafter referred to as SH interview. 207 their efforts outside of the actual moment of delivery were uncoordinated, or that there was a lack of forethought inherent in their work: far from it. In addition to the signposting and other logistical efforts to ensure smooth running that Oliver highlighted as characteristic of a Folkworks event, forward planning was seen as an integral part of the endeavour, even as far back as the early school projects and the first Absolute Beginners Day. Meeting the staff who they would work alongside in schools, even showing them a little of what to expect, was part of the job. Recalling the early days of Folkworks, Anderson remembered adopting such practices from the outset:

We started having meetings before we would do a project, we started having meetings with the [school] teachers, getting them involved before we ever went into the school. So that us and whoever was going to be involved, the other deliverers if you like, were starting to think ahead, enough to be ready to talk to the teachers and [give them a] little experience which would be a learning experience. It was great that Sandra [Kerr] came up north … she’d done a lot of work with kids, but a lot of community work, which requires a lot of forethought. You’ve got to remember, these are bright people! I mean, when you suddenly say to Sandra, “ok now we’re going into this sort of a school”, if she says “Well I’ve never done that before”… well, she’s going to think about it! Or if, when we (a little bit later on) thought wouldn’t it be great to have absolute beginners days, and you’d go to [piper] Dave Shaw or something, because you knew he had some sets of pipes, and you’d say “ok, this is what’s going to happen during the day”, you know, he’s going to sit around and think “ok, so what are the best ways, if we’ve only got this number of hours, to get them to that stage”. And certainly, I did very much the same on the concertina for that [Absolute Beginners Day]: that was suddenly another challenge. Yes, people were thinking about it, and sometimes you would share that [with each other].

4.5.1 Stewart Hardy’s Assessment: Four Values

Stewart Hardy summed up what he believed the most important principles he had picked up from working with Folkworks as being four things to consciously value: the value of people, the value of honesty, the value of enthusiasm and the value of preparation.44 Taken as a whole, they are an excellent indicator of the ethos which Folkworks instilled in their staff. When stressing the importance of placing real value on the people, Hardy did not just mean the participants, but also the incoming staff. Anderson’s belief that, for a beginner, being taken seriously and treated equally by an established player could provide a crucial inspiration was one of the key tenets of Folkworks from the earliest days, but Hardy extends this to

44 The value of honesty is a more succinct paraphrasing of the value he expressed in lengthier terms, the rest of the values are exactly as he described them. 208 include the value and esteem that less experienced staff were held in, a principle which was demonstrated in real terms by financial parity amongst teaching staff:

One of the things that gave me so much incentive to do a good job was knowing that I was getting paid the same amount as somebody who’d been doing it for a long time and had an international reputation. We were all in it together, and you were just expected to do as good a job—you’re worth as much. It was a huge incentive. So this kind of shared responsibility, I’ve certainly picked up that.

As shown above, the individuality of a tutors approach was central to establishing a credible rapport with a class, and often the key to successful transmission of the music. The honesty of being oneself, without building up any artificial barrier between pupil and teacher, was central to this approach. In Hardy’s estimation, this was exemplified by a piece of advice he had received from many of his mentors:

Another thing, and this is advice I remember getting from Chuck [Flemming], from Alistair, from David, was never pretend that you know it all, and if you don’t know something, say so. Or, if you’ve made a mistake, hold your hand up to it and find a resolution to it, don’t try and hide it in some kind of façade of omniscience.

As Anderson stated, a ‘passion lead’ approach with ‘energy and vitality in the thing’ was of paramount importance to Folkworks when engaging a tutor, as this was needed to create the instant impact that grabbed a class from the outset. In addition to this, Hardy places great value on enthusiasm for creating an appropriate atmosphere for conducting a class:

The value of enthusiasm! Watching Alistair work, and David… if people are mentally in the right place, then one; they’re much more open to what it is that you’ve got to offer, and two; they’re much more forgiving. They’re not going to sit there in judgement of you saying “I could play that better than him” or whatever. If they’re on your side, then they get that through enthusiasm.

As both Anderson and Oliver were keen to assert, the level of preparation prior to a Folkworks event, be it a one of workshop or entire residential course, a lesson Anderson had carried since his 1970s bi-annual excursions to the USA.

The value of being prepared: I got a lot of that from Alistair and David. Having a plan, being prepared, and also being prepared to abandon the plan. If you go somewhere particularly rich, then sod it that you’ve done all of that particular preparation, you’re going down another avenue. Having the confidence to let go, and go with a good avenue of thought.

209 Although not a teaching methodology in the strictest sense, these four values combine to form a framework of expectation around the act of teaching, both from the teacher and the pupils’ perspective, forming an unspoken understanding of what it meant to be present at a Folkworks event. These are not rules, but ideals, and as such they are open to a degree of personal interpretation: each one represents an interactive, two-way moment of communication. None of the tutors or students interviewed or observed during the course of this research would ever reduce such intensely meaningful and personal a set of principles to a mere four words, but my task was to uncover ‘the Folkworks method’; It should be clear that I do not believe that a method is an apt description of what I witnessed whilst teaching for, learning from, and observing Folkworks in action, but if asked for a sound-bite description of what Folkworks practice entailed, than this four word reduction of Hardy’s assessment would be it: People. Passion. Personality. Preparation.

4.6 Twin Track: the Best of Neal, Wakefield and Sharp?

Alistair Anderson referred to the idea of running concerts and workshops concurrently, using with the same personnel and for the same audience, as the Twin Track approach. I have found no written reference to it as such, either amongst Folkworks documentation or press material, but several other staff members used the term in conversation. This was the most publicly visible, high profile contribution that Folkworks made to folk music education, and was an indisputably innovative addition to the preceding methodological approaches.

As discussed above, the aim of Folkworks was to provide the best possible teachers, and thus a clear parallel can be drawn between Folkworks approach and Cecil Sharp’s expert lead, top down model that had come to dominate folk music tuition in the first half of the 20th century. Yet, unlike the Sharpean way, there was no list of approved material, nor was there an accepted and approved methodology for delivering it. In the case of Folkworks, their tutors’ undeniable expertise was worn more lightly than in Sharp’s model, and drew its authority not from the centralized, identically trained body of staff of Sharp’s ideal scenario, but rather from the individual instructors’ ability to communicate their own connection with, and passion for, their particular tradition. Despite this distinction, Folkworks tuition was (and still is) undeniably top-down, and expert lead by design, specifically to capitalize on the advantages entailed in that approach. A single teacher, especially in a relatively small class, can deliver a very focused lesson, drawing from only a single vision and imparting the desired

210 content with precision. Most importantly for Folkworks, the individual enthusiasm of the tutor was just as important as their musical prowess in communicating the music to the participants: top down, expert led, and personality driven. Anderson himself considered Folkworks part of a legacy aligned with a Nealite approach, believing that both the revival and the folk education movement would have been very different if she had ‘won’ (although whether he was aware of Neal’s efforts in 1988 remains unclear), and would thus probably be surprised to see a parallel drawn between Sharp’s orthodoxy and his own work.45 It should be remembered that Sharp’s efforts were highly successful, dominating the teaching of folk music for half a century; whatever one feels about his personal conduct and his treatment of those he perceived as opponents, Sharp’s methodology could not have persisted for so long unless it had a degree of merit.

In that Folkworks participants were learning directly from practitioners, rather than through a mediating third party, there are also similarities to the peer led, lateral ideal of the Nealite camp. Neal was adamant that the music should be learned directly from those who made it, and this was also a central principle to Anderson’s Twin Track. Being able to see the same individuals on the stage and in the classroom, and by moving between these two roles making the former seem achievable by participating in the latter, was the entire aim of the Twin Track arrangement. In this regard, both Anderson and Neal advocated a return to direct contact with the source as the best method for transmitting the authentic feeling of the music, and thus eliciting a genuine, personal emotional response from their students. Being generations apart, there are of course differences: they were both responding to different times. In Neal’s day, there had been no such concept as the professional folk musician with a national or international following, nor were there recordings widely available, either to reinforce that status, to purchase as a souvenir or to use as a study aid; folk musicians with a degree of national public exposure, such as Anderson himself, did not form part of her experience. Yet Anderson was able to use his own profile to win influential backing for his educational cause, much as Neal had utilized her own society background and extensive network of contacts to further her own.

With reference to the emergence of professional folk musicians, the return to dedicated professional venues was also a central to Folkworks’ strategy. The second revival until that point had deliberately eschewed the concert hall platform, believing it to embody the worst of the gentrifying attempts inherent in the pre-war revivalists perceived appropriation of the

45 Informal interview at AFO conference 2010. 211 people’s music. By doing so, and tying itself into a symbiotic relationship with the folk club circuit, the audience had become limited to pre-existing practitioners only; an ouroboros loop wherein the existing audience was the entire scene, and the scene was no more or less than that audience. But the loop was shrinking, tightening into a noose; as the older players passed away, there was no inroad for a new generation to take their place: the insular nature of the scene was choking it. By identifying the new circuit of arts centres as a potential source of new interest in folk, both consumers and practitioners alike, Anderson and his team had broken this cycle, creating a new folk that was defined by activity rather than affiliation. In the same 1991 FolkRoots interview quoted earlier, Ros Rigby’s defense of this change was simple and straightforward: ‘We’ve never been frightened to go for the best, and we try to go for high quality venues as well: there’s no reason why folk music should always be associated with pubs’.46 The point about pubs is well founded, as the licensing laws were a major barrier to youth participation in folk club activities within the club scene: where could a genuinely interested, yet unaccompanied thirteen or fourteen year old go to experience folk music, let alone join in? Alistair Anderson had arrived at folk music without his family having any prior involvement in the scene, and one of his key motivations was to enable others in that position, at that age, to find a similar way in: this could not have happened through the folk clubs at that time.

There are similarities too with those Nealite values unknowingly re-adopted by second revival folk educators. Anderson’s extensive compositional portfolio bears witness to the fact that the idea of a malleable tradition, which can be contributed to by the practitioners who were its bearers, was central to Folkworks outlook; as Anderson’s own inspirations (Pigg, Taylor, Atkinson etc) had been tune writers of note, so this was a continuation rather than an addition to the local tradition. The lack of single educational blueprint was also inherited from this lineage, as neither Neal nor those who had continued her legacy would subscribe to the notion of ‘one size fits all’ approach to teaching music without reference to the specific setting in which it was to occur. Even the more extreme suggestions that teaching itself should be abandoned (put forward both by Neal pre-war and Cooke in 1977) are present to an extent in the Folkworks' ethos; by containing the informal sessions and peer-interactions of the Summer schools within the Folkworks setting, spontaneous peer-led, lateral learning was built in to the experience, whilst remaining in the safe and supportive bounds of the organisation’s influence. This was a facet of their praxis which was acknowledged by the tutors: whilst observing the 2010 Summer School, three staff members, each on different occasions, were at

46 Nield, 1991, 33. 212 pains to tell me that I was ‘looking in the wrong place’ and should focus on the peer interactions.47

In a similar manner to Mary Wakefield’s deliberate reinforcement of the positive aspects of her competition festivals by promoting an over-arching culture of co-operation and shared goals, Folkworks sought to situate all of their work within a wider context of their ethos of inspirational, energetic and enthusiastic promotion of the music. What made it work so well for Folkworks was that their participants and tutors were also emotionally invested in the continuation of this ethos. Both Stewart Hardy and David Oliver have alluded to their love for the organization and the work it could do in the interviews quoted above; both were so inspired by what they saw that they began to work for Folkworks, seemingly not motivated by the financial gains: Oliver took a substantial drop in salary to do so. Hardy, whilst professing that Folkworks was far from the best paid work he was getting at that time, placed greater value on the camaraderie than the paycheck: ‘You felt valued, you felt that they were giving you what they had available, so it felt that you were all part of a team, part of a family and part of a shared experience…’. This connection went beyond the staff. When participants at the 2011 summer school found out that there would be fewer bursary-assisted places at future summer schools due to budget constraints, they responded without prompting with a fundraising effort, which they called ‘The Big Busk For Folkworks’. On the second and third of September that year, groups of teenaged Folkworks students took to the streets in Newcastle, Hexham, Corbridge, York and several other towns to attempt to raise enough money for one free place at the next summer school. According to an internal memo for Sage Gateshead staff, the combined total was around £450, almost doubling what had been available, and demonstrating ‘…a wonderfully altruistic initiative by the young musicians and a real indicator of how important they believe the Folkworks Summer Schools to be’.48

4.6.1 The Legacy of Folkworks

I think one of the most rewarding things, reflecting on it, for me was those projects which weren’t started by Folkworks, but which wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for Folkworks, if that’s clear. There was a young band called Southwind created

47 It should be noted that none of them asked me what it was that I was actually looking for before asserting that I was wrong, and it cannot be ruled out that the impetus to approach me had not come from a single member of staff, especially as they all used similar wording to make the point. However, regardless of the origin of the critique, at least one influential member of staff was convinced enough of the central value of the peer interaction to seek to intervene in my observations: we must assume their motivation was genuine, despite the execution. 48 Posted in an all-staff email thread called ‘Items for Teams’ on 14/09/11, article 4, Posted by K. Dowson. 213 in Gosforth by a couple of parents and a keen local music teacher. They just encourage teenagers to form a little folk band. Matthew and David Jones [now of ‘Last Orders’], their sister Sarah and lot of others were part of that. They went on to win Radio 2 Folk award.49 That wasn’t started by Folkworks, nobody said to them ‘will you start a band in Gosforth’, they just did it. But they were empowered to do it, they were inspired, they were given the idea, they were given the means to do it by Folkworks. They knew where to look for a good tutor; they knew what sort of performance outlets there were… They got it all from Folkworks, but Folkworks didn’t do anything, didn’t raise a finger, to make it happen. To me that was the greatest part of the Folkworks legacy: things that happened because of it, but that we hadn’t done ourselves. That’s what we did: we empowered the region to love its own folk music, and to bring people into it.

David Oliver’s personal assessment of the lasting legacy of Folkworks reveals a generosity towards the local folk scene as a whole; the wider gift of musical empowerment to the North East being of greater importance than the individual achievements of Folkworks. Yet the legacy of Folkworks is often hidden in plain sight in the North East. A busker playing some Northumbrian tunes on the fiddle by the Metro station, an maroon accordion case carried on the back of a passer by showing a glimpse of an ID tag that shows it was rented from the Folkworks instrument bank, a pub folk session with a surprisingly young demographic: all reveal the hand of Folkworks intervention, once you know how to look for it. Looking to the national level, a surprising number of the top tier commercial folk performers have been participants at Folkworks Summer Schools: of , Hannah James of , sisters Rachel and Becky of , the entire line ups of 422, Tyde and Last Orders, and solo performers such as Rob Harbron, Bella Hardy and many more are all Folkworks alumni. Many of those mentioned have also returned to the Summer Schools as tutors, beginning a new cycle of inspiration for the next generation coming though.

There was always a bigger purpose than just the thing itself. We had this vision that it would be… *he pauses*… one of Alistair’s phrases was that it would be as normal to see someone walking down Tyneside, walking down the street, with a fiddle case as it was to see them walking down the street with a fishing rod or a snooker cue.

It is this normalization of folk music in the local area which I believe will be the longest lasting legacy of the work of Alistair Anderson and Folkworks. I would like to end this chapter with a narrative describing exactly this effect. It concerns a BBC television programme called ‘Come Clogdancing: Treasures of English Folk Dance’, and more specifically the way in which it was silently enabled by Folkworks’ legacy. I would like to let the narrative speak for itself, but as you read it, bear in mind the following:

49 As Last Orders. Southwind were finalists in 2006, losing out to Bodega. 214 No other city in the UK would have been able to stage such an event: the necessary resources of one hundred and forty pairs of dancing clogs could only have been mustered from the Folkworks clog bank, and whilst other regions may have a similar number of active dancers— Stockport boasts a good number of young North West style dancers thanks to the work of the Fosbrooks, for example—one hundred and forty volunteer dancers to fill those rented clogs would require a significant pre-existing level of public interest to muster. The BBC has made another documentary on Clog dancing since, in which the Unthank sisters tour the country’s hotspots, but again they drew on two long time Folkworks associates from the North East region. Whilst the undoubted talent of and energy of both Laura Connolly (see below) and the Unthank sisters should not be downplayed, both documentaries are built on the back of over twenty years of regional folk arts support, development and promotion from Folkworks.

Late on a Saturday morning, and I’m sat in my dressing gown at home, cup of tea by my side, checking the BBC news website. I’m tired, having got in from a gig somewhere between 1:30 and 2am, and this is part of my standard wakeup routine after working a late night. My eye is caught by a link to a ‘magazine’ article on the front page of the website, 50 asking ‘Is clog dancing making a comeback?’. I am intrigued, as traditional English folk arts of any kind are not normally front-page material, and I am clearly an interested party. Clicking through, I find an article of the same title, written by Lucy Wallis, which contains a couple of embedded video clips. The article is promoting a show called ‘Come Clog Dancing: Treasures of English Folk Dance’, which is due to air that night (Dec 11th 2010) at 7pm on BBC4. It is only now that I realise I am aware of this project, as I recognise one of the dancers in the second video still. Laura Connolly (née Thirkell) is a graduate of the folk degree at Newcastle, an excellent clog dancer (currently gigging regularly with the Demon Barber Road Show) and a colleague of my girlfriend Britta, as they both worked together on the Early Years team at the Sage Gateshead. I knew Laura had been involved with the BBC on a show about clog dancing, as mutual friends of ours had been involved with the music making. I call Britta over to the computer, knowing she will want to see the footage, and press play. The clip is set in what appears to be a typical tarmac primary school play area, and opens with Laura and the show’s presenter, conductor and radio 3 DJ Charles Hazelwood, putting on clogs. Hazelwood professes to being ‘a total clog virgin’, and is shown several simple steps whilst a voiceover explains some basic principles of the dance (for example ‘a step’

50 ‘Come Clogdancing: Treasures of English Folk Dance’, Harry Benney, BBC4 Television, 2011. The page for the programme, which is still repeated occasionally, is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wmy5q, (23/10/17). 215 being not one single tap, but a set of several linked movements that usually last for 8 bars of music). I am surprised to see reference made to regional variations in step between the North East and Lancashire, with Laura explaining and demonstrating that the former tradition uses a ‘rounded shuffle’, with the foot turning outward on the forward stroke, as this ‘just looks nicer’. I begin to wonder if there has been more attention paid to detail than I would have expected from what appears to be a cross between a reality show and a documentary. The clip ends after a couple of minutes, with Hazelwood, sat on the grass at the side of the playground, extolling the virtues of Laura’s teaching, and clog dancing in general.

The other video clip, labeled ‘clog dance flashmob take Newcastle by storm’ sounds promising, so I click on that too. This is a longer (4’28”) and more contrived piece, with establishing shots of Newcastle’s monument square on a busy shopping day mixed with close ups of clogged feet in the crowd. We see Laura, in typical stage wear of a bright red top and black leggings, weaving through the crowd. I turn to Britta and mention that Laura is definitely in ‘performing mode’ already (her facial expression has changed, and she is moving with definite purpose), and Britta nods in agreement: she recognises the change in body language too. Laura finds herself a space (just outside the Charles Grey pub), stops, composes herself, and then begins to clog with her usual speed and precision. There are shots of the crowd response, mostly surprised faces, although some are seemingly indifferent. Within a few bars, two of her colleagues from the Demon Barbers join her, dancing in a triangle. The sound of many pairs of clogs marching fills the speakers as groups of participants file down towards Grainger Street and place themselves in formation, as onlookers are shown in various states of confusion and disbelief. The three dancers now have an arm raised each, and when the drop them in unison, all of the clog sounds end with a single stamp, and then silence. A pause, and then fiddle music starts up. The three dancers are now at the top of Grainger street, and lead the participants in a dance relatively simple steps, made impressive by the sheer number of dancers, and the sound of so many clogs hitting paving. This is cut with shots of onlookers craning their necks to get a good view and pointing, and a wide shot, showing the number of participants, and the arrival of three large, bright green and as yet unexplained oil barrels spaced out near the local branch of French Connection. There are close ups of heels clicking together, and of Hazelwood dancing in the front row with a look of determined concentration on his face. There is a cut (which the jump in the music betrays as a cut in time as well as camera angle) to Hazelwood dancing a solo facing the band, seen also from behind the band, whilst a ring of participants clap in time. Cuts to shots of audience applause allow for another change of tune, and a group of dancers,

216 led by an older woman cut in from the band’s left, performing a deft routine in a very traditional style, arms firmly by their sides, a slight smile fixed on their faces. The applause for this performance morphs into a roar as five rapper dancers burst into the ring, swords aloft, contrasted against a lovely shot of a young girl literally jumping up and down with excitement at their arrival. The crowd roars their approval as they perform a double tumble, and applauds as they hold up the locked swords at the end of the dance. The next happening reveals the purpose of those garish barrels: Laura, flanked by her two colleagues, steadied aloft by a pair of hands apiece, as the three of them dance on the barrel tops. The sound is metallic, booming and resonant, and appears to really ring through the square. What sounds like applause at the end of this set-piece turns out to be the thunder of all the participants clogs as Hazelwood conducts the dynamics of their stamping, bringing the volume right down before coming up to a climactic flurry and ending with massed jump. There are wide shots of a delighted audience as the crowd disperses and the clip ends.

As we watch we discuss what we are seeing, remarking as we recognise faces in the crowd shots. We both recognise the fiddle players by their tone before we see them in shot, we know there can only be one concertina player keeping up with rapper speed tunes with such drive. We recognise the rapper side as the Newcastle Kingsmen: know all of the dancers. As the clip finishes, we both fall silent. We know we should be feeling the elation of the crowd, and be happy for our friends for their moment on TV, but…

Britta voices what we are both thinking. “Such a shame” she says. She knows I’m now seeing this as work, not recreation, and sees what I see: a great, lost opportunity. The four musicians are Alistair Anderson on concertina, and the trio of Fiddlers is the band King Cole, all of whom are folk degree graduates and two of whom teach for Folkworks Tuesdays. Of the five dancers deployed by Newcastle Kingsmen, one is a Sage Gateshead/Folkworks employee and 3 are folk degree students. Of the approximated 140 participants, there are a good number whose faces I recognise from the Folkworks’ Adult Summer School and Folkworks’ Tuesdays evening classes, as well as at least two more folk degree graduates, as members of the band Spinndrift are clearly visible dancing next to each other in one of the wide shots. Furthermore, the clogs must have all been hired from the Folkworks' instrument bank at the Sage Gateshead: nowhere else in the country could have supplied that many pairs of dancer’s

217 clogs in such a range of sizes at short notice.51 In short, there are all the hallmarks of a Folkworks intervention, but no mention of the organisation is made anywhere in the article or in the video clips. It is clear that this incredible event could not have taken place in this City, and at this time, without the presence of Folkworks’ personnel, resources and the legacy of the years they spent supporting and promoting the traditional music and dance of the North East. But this is only clear to us. How would the wider public know?

Britta says that she has seen footage of the flashmob before, and I move over to let her use the keyboard. A few different searches typed into YouTube, and a video entitled ‘Clog Dancing at Newcastle Monument 2010, posted by user Lynas007, yields the result she was looking for.52 It reveals the date of filming having been the 10th of July 2010.53 This has been filmed on a mobile phone, and appears from the elevation to have been shot from a position standing on the bench outside the Fatface store on Grainger Street. It opens with a sequence the BBC chose not to use in their final edit: a grand chain of participants in a giant oval, weaving in and out and shaking hands, whilst singing ‘Wor Geordies’ lost ‘is Penka’. The musicians are in the centre of the oval, moving in a circle, Alistair playing with his usual animation. Laura passes the camera in the chain, joining in with a very earnest manner, enunciating the song clearly, making definite eye contact and giving a very pronounced shake of each participant’s hand as she passes. “You can tell she works in Early Years”, I mutter to Britta, who smiles in recognition. This sequence lasts for 1’17”, and had clearly already started when Lynas007 started filming. The musicians move into a semi circle, the crowd are encouraged by someone off camera to clap along, and then the view pans round to reveal that this is the moment when Hazelwood’s solo had actually taken place. He performs the same set of steps twice, before retiring toward the nearby Starbucks. This is the cue for the traditional dancers mentioned earlier, and Alistair plays an introduction before the three fiddles join him. Tight, neat and more choreographed than we had seen in the previous video, the sequence lasts for two full times through a hornpipe, much longer than shown in the official edit, and four times the length of Hazelwood’s solo. As they receive the applause and move away, another group moves up from the rear of the oval. Britta tells me that these are contemporary and street dancers drafted in from Dance City, and that their leader is one of the choreographers of the entire piece. They have clearly spent a lot of time thinking about their appearance—all hair

51 Britta was later able to confirm this. Her colleague, who was responsible for the hires at the time, was surprised to find that when the clogs came back in, somebody had swapped a pair that they had hired 5 years ago for a less well worn newer pair, not realizing that the pairs are individually numbered. 52 The entire channel has since been de-activated, but the it was originally here: Defunct Url of Lynas007’s youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3D_IIQdcLCQ 53 Which explains my own absence. I was playing at Ely Folk Festival in Cambridgeshire that weekend. 218 products, makeup and shades—and their routine is very much based on contemporary street dance, with big arm gestures, gyrations and flicks of the head, ending with a contrived pose for the cameras. Were it not for the sound of the clogs, it would seem to be totally unconnected to the rest of the event, which may explain why it didn’t make it past the cutting room floor. They give way in turn to the roaring charge of the Kingsmen (who circle a startled pedestrian with a camera who wandered across the oval). Again, this is a much longer dance than the BBC edit intimates, with a single tumble preceding the double that was included in the film proper. The camera is moved to show Alistair and a fiddle player, both watching the dancers like hawks as they play Athol Highlanders (a 64 bar jig, showing how long the Kingsmen danced for) at the usual breakneck rapper speed.

Then the footage cuts, and we rejoin the action as the participants sing the chorus to a Geordie song. During the verse, they perform a series of steps, whilst a lone voice sings – Lynas007 pans to reveal Alistair as the voice, singing through an old fashioned megaphone. Panning back reveals Hazelwood at the opposite end of the oval conducting. This is another sequence that was cut from the final footage. It ends with the ‘clog thunder’ that was used to wrap up the BBC website clip. After the jump, the participants applaud themselves and each other, and the phone turns to see Hazelwood with a microphone addressing the crowds (which are just as impressive in number in this amateur footage—no editing trickery has been used here). He talks about how clog dancing “brings a smile to your face, rhythm to your feet and joy to your heart”. He explains that it comes from the coalmines, and far from being ‘airy fairy’ it is a dance that ‘real men’ did.54 He explains that it is 100 years since the 1909 West Stanley mining disaster in which 168 miners died, and dedicates the performance to those miners with the cry “UP CLOGDANCING!”. The crowd cheer, and the phone is switched off.

I’m still feeling mixed emotions. It was clearly a great event, witnessed by many people, and lasting much longer in reality than the BBC footage shows. But it is Alistair’s presence and energy on the day, there in the centre of the oval for so much of the time, that haunts me after watching it. The footage from the public has made it seem all the more obvious that an opportunity to further the cause of Folkworks has been allowed to slip away. Are we seeing the ghost of Folkworks past? Either way, I resolve to watch the full programme that night.

54 This may be true of Rapper dancing, performers of which wear clogs, but not of the wider clog dancing tradition, which began in the mill towns of Lancashire during the industrial revolution, and was initially developed and performed mostly by women. In the programme itself, this distinction was explained more clearly. 219

Logging on to Facebook after my gig that evening, before I have had a chance to watch the programme, there is already strong set of reactions appearing in people’s status bars almost as soon as the broadcast is over, with congratulations being showered on those who had taken part. The organiser of a major UK folk festival posted ‘Oh my god - how good was that?! I actually cried…’. I note that the Newcastle Kingsmen have created a new profile for themselves, in anticipation of a rise in public interest. Their status, at 20:38 on the night of the broadcast reads: ‘So anyone who liked our rapper dancing just then on BBC4, come and have a go at the Cluny, Byker this Wednesday 8:30pm’.

The hour-long show, which I watch on the BBC iPlayer late that night, goes some way toward ameliorating my disappointment. Whilst there is a touch of the usual mystic gibberish that seems to go hand in hand with any public rhetoric on folk traditions—Hazelwood explains that clog dancing originated in the Lancashire mills during the industrial revolution, reaching its peak of popularity in the late C19th, and then almost in the same breath talks about reviving ‘this ancient art’—much of it is very down to earth, more concerned with how the dance makes people feel in the here and now than evoking a semi-imagined past. I find myself slightly surprised by the references to how clog dancing is dying out, but then I realise that my awareness is not that of the general public. I know every single one of the dancers involved in the show, to the power of 2: If they are not personal friends, they are friends of friends.

I have played in three different bands that featured clog dancing in the performances, had long conversations with dancers about the ins and outs of their own traditions, so of course I know clogging is alive and well: I am on the inside. If a show like this, contrived as it is, can give that knowledge to thousands on the outside, then does the labelling really matter? Even if the Folkworks brand is not in evidence, the people are still out there doing the work. It may be a loss for the name and the organisation, but it must still be seen as a gain for the community in which they work, and what is good for a community must surely be good for a community organisation. So runs my train of thought as I watch, and towards the end of the show I almost believe it.

220 Conclusions

Throughout this thesis, I have carried out an investigation into the successive waves of change that have characterized the way in which folk and traditional music has been taught in England since the first period of revival, with the aim of building up a coherent picture of the shifts in ideological stance that occurred, and the resultant impact on the conceptions of appropriate teaching practice. The publications that represent the best record of public interest in folk song prior to the revival were assessed, demonstrating a clear move away from a silent record on an antiquarian’s page toward bringing the music back into living use, and a resultant drive for acquiring more songs through a focus on collecting. From this basis, the circumstances that led to a genuine revival of folk music, song and dance were detailed, and the influence of key contributors to the revival movement was assessed. After re-assessing the nature of the Sharp/Neal conflict as being primarily concerned with issues surrounding teaching and learning, the true impact of their division on future practice could be foregrounded. As Sharp’s vision came to dominate the teaching of folk during the inter-war period, the parallel developments in competitive folk music were discussed, and the innovative contribution that Mary Wakefield made by controlling and nurturing the culture that surrounded her competitions was highlighted. The BBC’s use of wireless broadcast technology was demonstrated to have allowed a single instructing figure to bring a unified repertoire of live participatory folk song simultaneously into the nation’s classrooms on a previously unacknowledged scale. The second revival’s radical new vision of folk song’s possibilities was shown to have filtered directly into the way the material was taught in schools, and in the process prompted a move back toward Neal’s position as Sharp’s fell from favour. Finally, the intervention of Folkworks presented a bold new strategy for folk music tuition, combining their chosen elements from prior practice to create considerable movement toward a unified approach that could transcend the prior imposition of a divided pedagogy.

The research questions posed in the introduction to this thesis (from the ‘thesis parameters’ section on p.27) formed a lens through which the changes in folk arts education practice could be viewed and contrasted against each other. What follows will be a breakdown of each chapter’s content in the light of those questions, to illustrate the changes that occurred during the different key development periods, and to suggest where the strengths and weaknesses of each successive approach lay.

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The research questions were:

1: What did practitioners of the time consider the true nature and role of folk music to be?

2: Did they believe that folk music should be taught in schools, and if so, how should this be done?

3: How did their perceptions of the nature of folk music feed into the ways in which they believed it should be taught?

4: What was the educational significance of folk music believed to be?

The First Folk Revival

Broadly speaking, the Nealite and Sharpian camps shared similar viewpoints regarding the historical origins and nature of folk music (as outlined in Chapter 1, subsection 1.3.1): they were both convinced that was an endangered, partial survival of a more ancient and vital form of cultural expression. Being relics of a bygone era — pre-dating the industrial and agricultural revolutions at least, if not all of recorded history — authentic folk practice could now only be found in isolated rural communities which preserved sufficient elements of the ‘old ways of life’ to allow for its tenuous survival. Most importantly, through these precious remnants of communal memory, folk practices represented a link to the nation’s ‘natural’ state of being, and thus could offer a way to combat the various ills that were perceived to threaten society at the time. Neither side was in any doubt that folk music’s very nature made it a useful tool that both could and should be used for the public good.

Whilst both camps were in agreement that it was this inherent quality of simple, artless naturalness that granted folk music (and by extension folk dance and ritual drama) its special educational significance, the way in which this quality was thought to manifest itself was a major focus of contention between them. For Sharp and his followers, the folk-song-as-object was the key to unlocking and revitalising the latent sense of national aesthetic in the youth of his day; the very mode, scale and phrase of the song was held to contain a much needed

222 essence of racially embedded musical identity. The form of the music could not be tampered with without compromising the inherent value of the material, and so to preserve this fragile quality intact meant notating, publishing and teaching the song as ‘scientifically’ as possible, with no real room for individual expression or variation in performance. For Neal and her associates, by contrast, it was the way that taking part made the individual participant feel that provided the pathway back to a healthier, more balanced existence: only by doing could the perceived evils of modernity be undone. Given these differences in opinion, it was almost inevitable that the two camps would find themselves in opposition over the issue of whether or not folk music was, by its very nature, suitable for use in schools.

Sharp, the professional educator, believed the presence of folk music in the school curriculum to be an absolute necessity: the primary weapon in the battle to rejuvenate the national musical consciousness. His prolific published output for the schools market was key to implementing his strategy with the consistency necessary for a countrywide project. This unprecedented outpouring of bespoke educational folk music was enabled not only by his seemingly tireless appetite for fieldwork and collection but also by his connections and supporters within the existing educational establishment; Sharp had both an abundance of suitable material and the means to have it manufactured and widely distributed. From a pupil’s perspective, Sharp had provided a genuine alternative to art music for classroom use, and his guidelines suggesting that such material be learned by ear, from the singing of the teacher, presented greater accessibility to those who had not received much in the way of formal music training. The fact that the BBC would still draw on Sharp’s collections when compiling Singing Together broadcasts half a century after his death (see section 2.5) stands as a testament to how embedded Sharp’s legacy had become within the British school experience. However, by relying so heavily on the conventions and customs of the education establishment of his day to deliver his ideas, and thus inextricably and inflexibly linking his own educational programme to the practices of that particular period, Sharp was unknowingly incorporating the seeds of a future obsolescence into his efforts. Combined with his similarly unbending and dictatorial conception of the nature of authentic folk practice —which would find itself gravely at odds with those of the post-war revival— the inability for his approach to react to changes in mainstream education would ultimately lead to it falling out of favour.

Neal, with her consuming passion for philanthropy and social work, saw the rules and regulations of Sharp’s approach as an inherent stifling of the expressive impulse within the tradition. Just as Sharp’s background and position within the education establishment was a

223 determining factor in what applications he was able to envision for folk music, so too did Neal’s own long-held social conscience channel her thinking on folk education toward a pre- existing goal: what she was looking to provide was a sociable and healthy activity for the working poor. Unsurprisingly then, Neal’s view was that folk music and dance were most valuable as leisure activities, and willing participation, rather than enforced classroom study, was vital to allowing the individual to find a personal engagement and enjoyment in that activity. From Neal’s perspective, it was the interactional nature of the transmission of tradition that enabled participants to enter into the correct spirit, and this was simply not possible within the strict and didactic environment of the Edwardian classroom. Unfortunately, by proposing a fairly radical departure from the prevailing educational concepts of the day —one which by its very nature produced little in terms of written instruction— Neal placed herself and her followers at a marked disadvantage, and ultimately did not emerge victorious in the struggle for folk music’s pedagogy. From a 21st century folk educator’s perspective, Neal’s innovations are highly appealing and probably align better with contemporary practice, but it cannot be denied that Sharp’s approach was demonstrably more successful at the time.

The analysis of the first revival period reveals that an entirely unnecessary forced dichotomization of pedagogical stance was introduced into the discourse around folk music education, and that the consequences of this division resonated through the ensuing eight decades without significant challenge. The Sharp/Neal conflict created an artificial split between two sets of values that was entirely of their creation. Prior to their adoption of intentionally adversarial positions, there was no inherent binary opposition in folk music practice between, for example, cerebral and embodied experiences of the same piece of music, but rather a sliding scale between the intellectual and physical enjoyment of the piece, along which any given performer could position themselves according to their own preference. It is clear from their respective accounts that both Sharp and Neal sincerely and passionately believed that they were representing the true nature of tradition with their arguments, yet in doing so they unwittingly enforced a series of false dichotomies, the shades of which still haunt folk music education to this day. It is worth stating again that it was these two who, when united and applying their efforts toward a single goal, were the dual architects of folk revival in England; it was the meeting of Neal’s spirited social focus with Sharp’s technical educational expertise in a compromised middle ground that offered the means by which a national revival movement was achieved. Divided, Sharp and Neal created two radical and seemingly irreconcilable positions from which to teach folk music that set up a

224 pendulum-like swing from one to the other over the following generations. The educational legacy of Sharp’s first revival dominance came to represent the worst excess of that movement’s authoritarian stance to the second revival’s educators, and yet in reacting against one extreme, the second revival saw the pendulum swing back toward the other. It is worth reiterating that neither Neal or Sharp’s approach is inherently superior to the other, and suitably adapted versions of both positions can provide a satisfactory teaching experience when well executed; the problematic issues arise when either is treated as an absolute: presented as a reified manifestation of the one true way in which folk music must be transmitted, with the other therefore demonized as being incontrovertibly false and conceptually anti-folk. At the very least, this thesis should serve as an adequate warning of the potential consequences of such polarized pedagogical positioning.

The terms ‘Sharpian’ or ‘Nealite’ offer useful shorthands to describe two different, oppositional sets of ideals, which allow us to describe similar outlooks as they re-occur during the following century. The same themes cropped up within the discourse surrounding the post war revival, for instance, and Folkworks was in many ways set up to counteract the perceived flaws in the Sharpian legacy, as it was enacted by the EFDSS at the time. It should not be assumed, however, that any individuals or organizations following after Sharp and Neal automatically set out to emulate one or the other ideology. In fact, Sharp’s deliberate and belittling marginalization of Neal’s impact would have made such informed practice extremely unlikely, certainly prior to the publication of Roy Judges’s attempt to rehabilitate Neal’s reputation in 1989.55 Rather, as it became clear during the course of this research that the same sets of binaries seem to have evolved independently for successive generations of folk educators, assigning terms to define them based on their first occurrence at the dawn of formalized folk music education seems both apt in attribution and useful in terms of furthering the contemporary debate. With the knowledge of prior educational extremities exposed as artificial constructs rather than inherent truths, what this research can offer to current folk education practitioners is a historically informed framework to position their own work within, with the full knowledge of what has gone before that we have previously lacked as a discipline. Armed with this information, we can make fully informed choices as to where along the conceptual axis between a Sharpean or Nealite position we place our own practice, and do so knowing that so long as we work in the interests of our pupils, and with a sensitivity and respect towards the music, we are never acting ‘against tradition’.

55 Roy Judge, ‘Mary Neal and the Espérance Morris’, Folk Music Journal, 5/5 (1989), 545-591.

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The Inter-War Period

The interwar years were more characterized by consolidation than innovation within the field of folk arts education, in England at least, as Sharp’s conquering pedagogical framework was deployed in schools across the country. The developments implemented by both Mary Wakefield and the BBC were more peripheral in nature than the absolute centrality of the Sharp/Neal conflict that had dominated the pre-war discourse that preceded them, but both never-the-less represented genuine innovations.

As Wakefield’s operational niche was in competition festivals rather than the broader field of education, the question of whether folk music should or could be taught in schools was not of particular relevance to her work, and we have no real way of knowing what her views may have been. She seems to have associated with parties on both sides of the folk-song-in-school debate equitably; both Frank Kidson (who was fervently opposed to the notion: see section 1.4) and Cecil Sharp were enlisted as judges for her folk song competitions at one time or another. We do know that she held folk song to be of some importance; she had a number of folk songs in her personal performance repertoire, and clearly considered the collecting of folk song to be of sufficient importance to be worth breaking her cardinal rule of not offering cash prizes to attract more competitors.

Despite having limited direct bearing on the way it was used in institutional settings, Wakefield made two important conceptual contributions to the ways in which folk music could be taught. The first was simply placing folk song within the same competitive events as art music, without ever putting folk and art musics in competition with one another. Competitive folk music had hitherto been a relatively self-isolating affair; even though the Eisteddfodau could be regarded as an exception by already placing folk music within a wider cultural framework, the exclusive use of the Welsh language was a factor limiting the spread of the concept. The second contribution that Wakefield made was the concept of an over- arching, meta-pedagogical envelope for the many individual events within her festivals, designed to engineer a communal and positive overall experience regardless of the eventual ranking achieved by groups and individuals within the competitive elements of the event. By placing such an emphasis on how her participants felt both during after her events, Wakefield was both following the same line of thought as Mary Neal, and also expanding it outward to 226 encompass group experience as well. Although the initial development of the meta- pedagogical outlook in folk music education should rightly be credited to Wakefield, her work did not have lasting direct legacy within folk arts education, and this notion was to largely disappear from the discourse until Folkworks developed a similar approach during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The BBC had included folk music as part of its educational output from the earliest days of its school programming, effectively answering the question as to whether the corporation believed that folk music had a place in their curriculum. This may simply have been due to the fact that it was already in widespread use in schools by the late 1930s, and thus the inclusion of folk song was in keeping with the mainstream educational practice of the day. When selecting folk songs for broadcast to schools, the BBC initially appear to have relied upon the available published collections of folk and/or national song for inspiration; in many cases, this meant following in the footsteps of the most prolific author of such materials: Cecil J. Sharp. Sharp’s conception of folk music education was actually ideally suited to the radio format, with the disembodied voice of the wireless adopting the role of the instructing expert. Sharp’s wish had been to spread folk music to as many school children as possible, and the wireless was an extremely effective medium through which to achieve that goal, with a potential reach that would have been unthinkable in those early years of pre-war revival. Some of the quality control concerns of the earlier folk educators could also be mitigated by broadcast; a single teacher giving the same lesson in hundreds of schools simultaneously allowed for a much more consistent delivery. Although written music was made available in the show’s pamphlets for the vast majority of the time it spent on air —only the late 1940s output contained a percentage of songs which had no notation presented in the booklet— learning by ear was always a possibility, which had not only been a tenet of Both Sharp and Neal’s approaches, but was to become a marker of authenticate transmission for post-war folk educators too.

What was missing was the reciprocal ability to monitor standards of pupil engagement and performance. There was certainly little scope for interaction between the pupils and their broadcasting tutor; even taking into account the early attempts by Walford Davis to encourage written responses, and the later request shows instigated in the 1970s by Singing Together, the only way to respond in either case was by post. Nor did BBC have adequate mechanisms for what we would term market research for much of Singing Together’s broadcast run, as corporation believed that their unique funding model placed them above such concerns: the

227 listener was not paying for the content directly, and thus did not constitute a market. Even as the post-war revival took shape and gained public momentum, the BBC’s school programming was slow to respond to the changes in thinking that accompanied the new movement. Throughout the 1950s and into the mid 1960s, the folk music content of singing together remained very much in line with the type of material that Sharp and the other pre-war publishers of his ilk had provided. It was not until Douglas Coombes’s tenure as producer that the industrial folk song championed by the second revival made significant inroads into the broadcast repertoire.

At its best, Singing Together allowed for the communal aspect of folk music practice to take hold in the classroom, following on from the show’s early days as a promoter of community song during the war years. The inclusivity of whole-class singing was amplified by the fact that, up and down the country, so many other classes would be singing at the same moment. As the data explored in chapter section 2.5 clearly demonstrates, much of what they were singing was folk song, and the value of such a large scale, regular and most importantly normalising encounter with folk song to the cause of folk music education is almost incalculable. By placing the British Isles’ own folk song on an equal footing with so many traditions from around the world, the BBC also highlighted the fact that traditional musics are a commonality between world cultures, and all have comparable cultural value; in this regard, they echoed Wakefield’s decision to position folk music on a equal footing with art music. Singing Together was not a dedicated folk music education project, however, but rather a diverse music programme that made significant use of folk music from the British Isles as part of the wider output. The presenters and producers were not folk music specialists, and the generalized approach to a broad-based music education that the BBC adopted, whilst undeniably successful over more than half a century, led to a degree of homogenization between genres. Although the potential reach of the show was admirable, the focus was far too broad and inclusive to keep the uniqueness of regional stylistic variation intact: the pamphlets reveal that the 1950s attempts to preserve each folk song’s county of origin had fallen by the wayside a decade later.

Ultimately, the true impact of the BBC’s use of folk music in their educational broadcasts is hard to assess, as there is simply insufficient data to establish the true numbers of schools and children engaged. Although by far the longest running and seemingly most successful, Singing Together was only one show amongst several others which employed folk music for classroom use between the 1940s and the 1990s. We can be sure that folk music played a

228 relatively central role in the corporation’s education strategy during that period, but the lack of comprehensive records makes determining significant quantitative data for the BBC’s entire educational output an extremely difficult and quite possibly unachievable goal. In the specific case of Singing Together, it was not possible to comprehensively establish more than the fact that a significant but frustratingly undefined percentage of British primary school children were being given a steady supply of participatory folk material for almost six decades. For now, we must be satisfied with having definitively established that Singing Together brought folk music into the classrooms of Britain in varying but significant quantities for fifty-seven years, in a way that was unique, and on an unprecedented scale that is unlikely to be repeated.

The Second Folk Revival

The radical leftist political agenda dominating the folk scene in the early to mid second revival was much more closely aligned with Neal’s proto- than Sharps radical conservatism. Within this context, the wholesale adoption of the seemingly Nealite values demonstrated in the various author’s contributions to Folk Music In Schools would almost seem to be a foregone conclusion. In fact, Neal’s central role in the initial revival had been so marginalised within the historical account by Sharp’s successors as to be almost unknown during this period. Instead, it would appear that these ideas were largely arrived at independently; by moving decisively away from the extremity of Sharp’s model for schools practice, the oppositional positions were simply where the conceptual reactionary pendulum swung. In fact, in the influence of the Critic’s group’s insistence on aesthetic standards and technical proficiency, we see the beginnings of the following backswing, once again moving away from perceived inadequacies of an extreme position.

The most significant change in the conceptions of folk music’s nature during the post war revival was the idea that it was a current concern, with a direct relevance to contemporary living (see chapter section 3.1). By aligning folk music on a historical continuum intertwined with the ongoing class struggle, the Marxist ideologies predominant at the outset of the new revival positioned the role of the folk music as an authentic artistic outlet for the working class experience. From this viewpoint, it was held that folk music could be found at any time and place that the proletariat could be found, whether farm hand or factory worker; the post war revival did not require a forgotten rural idyll to validate the place of the folk arts in

229 contemporary society. Significantly, since there were still working people able and willing to express their experience in song, the timeline now extended to include the present. This conception also allowed for the acknowledgement of material collected from urban and industrial settings, which lead to a marked expansion not just of the canon of folk song, but of what could be considered eligible for inclusion. Throughout the first revival — irrespective of whether Sharp or Neal’s vision was the approach adhered to — there had been an overriding assumption that participating in folk music, dance or drama was to participate in a recreation; it would always be a remaking of an artifact from an idealised past. With the role of the folk singer now re-envisioned as a contemporary mouthpiece for society, for the architects of the second revival it was ways in which the music spoke to the present, rather than harked back to the past, that was of primary importance.

In terms of the impact these new ideas had on folk arts teaching practice, there was a corresponding move toward making folk arts current and relevant within the curriculum; a recurring theme in the review of the contributions to Folk Music in Schools (Chapter section 3.4) was the notion that teachers and students alike could take ownership of the folk material they were working with, changing it to suit their experiences, locale, and any other situational educational needs. The DIY ethos of the skiffle boom, and the increasing availability of portable and affordable instruments (such as the guitar, banjo or autoharp) coupled with the rise of the folk club movement and a higher profile of folk artists in both broadcast and recorded media had all contributed to a sense that folk music was now accessible to anybody willing to try. This sense of folk music’s inherent achievability was another commonality between contributions to Folk Music in Schools. Following the example set by singer- songwriters such as Bob Dylan, Ewan MacColl and Pete Seeger, the writing of new material in the folk style, whether on topical or personal issues, was seen as a viable form of participation in the folk arts, and was also highlighted by the teachers writing in Folk Music in Schools as key application for folk music in the curriculum. Combined, these factors created a genuine sense of individual agency within folk arts participation that had hitherto been notably absent: this was to be the single greatest educational legacy of the postwar revival. In many ways, this represented both a return to, and a development of, the experiential focus of Neal’s approach, with the salient feature being how the individual developed their personal, emotional connection to the material.

Whilst the publication of new collections of industrial and urban material added much to the publicly available canon of folk song, there was a relative paucity of material being published

230 with the school’s market in mind. This presented a barrier for teaching staff looking to incorporate the folk arts into their classrooms but who lacked a pre-existing ‘in’ to the folk community. Folk Music in Schools, for all its strong and varied advice for existing folk artists who also happened to be teachers, had little by way of specific guidance for those on the outside of a community of practicing folk musicians looking in. Written both by and for a generation of teachers who had grown up in folk boom of the late 1950s and 1960s, with easy access to the abundance of new festivals and folk clubs that characterized the expansionist period of the post war revival, there was an underlying assumption throughout the book that access to the local folk community was simply a matter of going out and finding it. By the late 1970s, however, the folk clubs had already begun their turn toward the insular, and the chart success of folk rock and folk influenced pop acts had begun to re-introduce the notion of a performer/audience divide which had been actively suppressed during the initial impulse of the post-war revival: access had become both more difficult and more daunting, and Folk Music in Schools did not have an adequate response. In essence, the book was for folk musicians who went into teaching, not for teachers looking to tread the same pathway in reverse. In unknowingly enacting Nealite values, they had once again stumbled upon one of the key weaknesses of the earlier approach: a dependence on direct delivery from pre-trained or already competent staff, with few written resources available.

The Folkworks Intervention

Whilst the inputs of Ros Rigby, David Oliver and many others were crucial to the success of Folkworks in the long term, it was Alistair Anderson’s vision for new possibilities and opportunities in folk arts education that enabled the organization to offer an innovative and effective approach, and for this new approach to achieve such rapid success. As reported in Anderson’s interviews, there were other contemporary organizations —Jay Ungar’s workshops in the USA, the Feis network in Scotland and WREN in the South West of England— following similar trains of thought in their development, but the particular combination of approaches that Anderson and Folkworks arrived at would ultimately prove unique. The ability to inspire was the primary goal of a Folkworks event, and inspiration is not an age or curriculum specific commodity; whether teaching in schools, running evening classes, summer residentials or weekend workshops, Folkworks saw no need to narrow the educational remit to either adults or children. Whilst individual initiatives were successfully tailored to suit specific demographics, the organization as a whole was decidedly pluralistic in its outlook.

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Key to Anderson’s vision were his own memories of inspirational encounters with the very best players he could have hoped to meet and play alongside in his youth; recalling the seminal impact that these early encounters had upon his own musical trajectory, it was this crucial injection of inspiration that the new approach sought to replicate in each new setting. By linking a performance by high profile players or groups in a given locality with a chance to spend an intensive workshop session with the same musicians, Folkworks could provide an accelerated and concentrated version of that same inspirational encounter that was largely replicable from one venue to another. Each aspect of the ‘Twin Track’ fed into the other to amplify their impact; the workshop provided an insight into the performer’s craft that heightened the participants’ engagement with the concert, and the performance cemented the value of the workshop by reinforcing the performance credentials of the workshop tutors. Anderson’s innovation capitalized on assets that would have been unavailable to previous generations of folk arts educators. The ‘Twin Track’ would have been impossible to implement even fifteen to twenty years prior to Folkworks inauguration, as it was reliant on the emergence of the professional and semi-professional folk musician in sufficient numbers that they could form a visible and recognizable cadre of inspirational figures within the broader bounds of folk music practice. Nor would it have been easily achieved without the network of arts centres that had sprung up across the country during the 1980s, providing an effective bridge between the informality of the folk clubs and the professional atmosphere of the concert hall. Folkworks set out to provide an attractive and accessible gateway to the folk arts, recognizing that it was the initial encounter that was the missing link between folk and the majority of the population. Anderson himself had not been born into a ‘folk family’ or brought up in a close-knit rural community of traditional practitioners, so the difficulty and necessity of finding that first entry point had inspired a considerable portion of Folkworks’ educational brief.

Managing to successfully encompass schools work, leisure activities and adult education within their educational remit, Folkworks specialised in providing the initial burst of inspiration, but then following it up with regular tuition opportunities designed to maintain, support and enable the fledgling folk micro-community that they had seeded. If inspiration was they key to initiating a successful Folkworks project, then the key to sustaining it was the careful meta-framing of their activities. With little to no direct top down instruction as to how staff should deliver their teaching content, it was the over-arching ethos of encouragement,

232 empowerment and inspiration that tied all of the many and varied Folkworks initiatives together as a unified entity. Whilst this aspect of Folkworks’ programme echoes the initiative of Mary Wakefield, Anderson and Rigby’s development was far more comprehensive in scope and detailed in execution. Staff and participants alike felt a sense of communal ownership and emotional investment in the Folkworks as an entity. If being fortuitously born into a community that practiced traditional music and dance had once been the presumed route into traditional music, and such a community had been inherent in sustaining that practice, then Folkworks had hit upon a way of back-forming a supportive and nurturing community from the practice of the music. The ultimate goal was for Anderson and his carefully chosen tutors to be the catalysts for self perpetuating, communally focused pockets of folk music practitioners to spring up wherever an interest was expressed or uncovered, facilitating and supporting that initial inspirational until it could stand alone.

Even with such a comprehensive and varied education programme, Folkworks approach was not without potential flaws and pitfalls, and even this over-arching ethos could create potential pitfalls. If participants, used to the carefully nurturing environment of Folkworks’ events, attempt to generalize outward from their own experience and presume that all other social settings in which folk music is made will mirror that which they have experienced to date, then they run the risk of encountering opposition, if and when they transgress the cultural expectations of others. One incident that I witnessed personally illustrates just such a complication. Several members of the Sage Gateshead’s youth performance group Folkestra arrived at a pub session (at the now demolished Egypt Cottage in Newcastle), and sat together in a group. As soon as there was a break after a set of tunes, they proceeded to launch into sets of pre-arranged tunes that they had learned in the ensemble, exactly as they would perform them on stage, complete with the harmonies, dynamics, transitional interludes and pauses they had been taught. Session regulars unsurprisingly raised rather vocal objections after the second such set—it was impossible for anybody else to join in with these fully arranged concert sets— but what was most striking about the entire incident was the fact that the Folkestra players were genuinely surprised to have caused any offence. Another of Folkworks strengths does not necessarily help in such incidents: the high standard of playing typical amongst Folkworks younger players. A musician whose technical competence far outstrips their social acumen can easily come across as brash, rude or inconsiderate when encountering a different set of social session norms for the first time.

233 Another potential issue that arises from Folkworks’ approach is that such intensely personality driven teaching can be difficult to sustain through a change in personnel. By allowing staff to teach in whatever manner they wish, so long as it is demonstrably appropriate and effective, there is a risk that the teaching style of incoming tutors may be so radically different from that of their predecessor that the students are disorientated or discouraged by the change. This does not imply that either tutor’s method would be inherently wrong, simply that the gulf between their two styles of presentation could be sufficiently great so as to present a barrier to the participants’ ongoing engagement and enjoyment. This is mostly an issue in a weekly setting such as the Folkworks Tuesday evening classes, as it is in these repeated sessions, to which the same participants return for a term or more, that a level a comforting familiarity can develop over time. For the residential sessions, this is less of an issue, as one summer school can differ wildly from year to year, class to class without necessarily impacting on the enjoyment and engagement of the participants; each year’s event is a unique, never to be repeated entity with different participants and staff marking the particularity of that session. This personality driven approach can also be an issue more broadly, at an organizational level. It cannot be denied that since the departures of Alistair Anderson, David Oliver and more latterly Kathryn Tickell and Chris Pentney, the profile and reach of the Folkworks brand has diminished considerably. This is not to suggest that those who have taken up the mantle since have not been dedicated and passionate—they undoubtedly have—but rather that their efforts are hampered by the simple fact that they are not their predecessors.

Whilst Folkworks' greatest legacy to folk music is likely to be the number of participants it inspired to take the tunes and songs forward into the future, from an education perspective they demonstrated that a singular yet pedagogically flexible vision such as Anderson’s could achieve extraordinary success, especially when backed up by efficient administration and promotion and staffed by inspirational teachers. Although I have emphasized the ways in which prior teaching strategies were successfully adapted and incorporated into their overall strategy, it should be stressed that the twin track approach was functionally unique at the time of its inception, representing not only a genuine innovation but also a solution to the inherent weakness in the second revival’s guidance, as supplied in Folk Music In Schools: the need for an already competent staff body. Rather than merely accepting competence, Folkworks’ insistence on using only the best available tutors meant that when they went into a school, they brought a fully formed micro-version of the tradition with them. By beginning with the flashpoint of inspiration, and then supporting the growth of an enthusiastic local response,

234 they were able to let local micro-traditions flourish in their wake. Folkworks have shown that, as practitioners, we do not need to attempt to faithfully teach the tradition (singular) but that we can create a tradition of our own: based on a genuine respect and enthusiasm for what has gone before, but personalised for us, right now.

The Value of Folk Music in Education

Folk music has now had a place within the formalised education setting in the British Isles since the early 1900s, and the fact that it has maintained this place despite complex and protracted internal conflicts, significant advances in technology, sweeping societal change and many other challenges is a testament not only to the value and appeal of the music itself, but also to the many individuals and groups who have taken up custodianship of the traditions of these islands during that period. Whilst this research has often sought to highlight the differences between the various pedagogical stances examined, there are also some significant commonalities that should be noted. Firstly, folk music, having largely evolved through oral transmission, is ideally suited to being taught by ear, making the music accessible to those who have not had the benefit of prior private music education. This was a constant theme, from the earliest days of Sharp and Neal’s collaboration through to the teaching I witnessed from Folkworks a century later, and this aurality is a major selling point for folk music in schools and adult education, representing a genuine and accessible alternative to art music tuition.

Traditional music’s often anonymous origin is a feature which stands it apart from both art and popular musics, and can be turned to the advantage of the folk music educator; a traditional song or tune has no definitive original to act as a blueprint or standard of reference. When pupils perform a work such as a Bach cantata, a Schubert lied or a Gibbons motet, they are aspiring to an often-unattainable aesthetic benchmark. When they perform a popular song, whether Beatles, Bieber or , it is a cover version of another’s work, and the spectre of the original recording often looms large in both the performer and listener’s assessment of its success. When they perform a traditional piece, it is their version; this is especially true if they have made alterations to the received text or melody in order to further personalize it. Whilst folk music is by no means immune to commercial influence or passing trends, folk has existed at sufficient distance from the mainstream for long enough that this sense both of communal ownership and individual agency —traceable from Neal’s pioneering

235 ideas through to the post war revivalists and onward into Folkworks practice model— offers perhaps the greatest attraction: A music that can simultaneiously belong to you, and that you can belong to.

For The Future…

Inevitably, no Ph.D thesis can explore every single avenue that its author would have wished, and there are some areas that would be of interest to study further. Should the BBC ever uncover and release Singing Together’s audience figures across the decades, it would be relatively simple to generate projections of the likely number of students reached. Similarly, a larger database containing the exact content of every known booklet would remove all conjecture as to the percentage of folk content that was broadcast, but again there is no central repository on which to call for access to a complete collection — the BBC do not have them archived — and thus collating a complete selection would almost certainly require a national effort to co-ordinate collectors: an effort that would most likely involve digitizing individual collectors resources to a central online location for ease of communal access. Such extensively collaborative activity is not in keeping with the nature of PhD research, and thus any effort I am personally able to make in that regard would necessarily postdate this work. Perhaps the most feasible method to establish to what extent the current folk scene has benefited from the BBC’s emphasis on folk song in the show would be to instigate a national survey of folk club participants, festival audiences and online forum users who were of primary school age or older at any point prior to the show’s cessation in 1997. Surviving listeners to the first broadcasts in 1939 would be at the very least in their mid eighties at the time of writing, and thus such a survey would need to be undertaken soon in order to gain access to those earliest memories before they are irretrievably lost: the BBC has precious little information from that era, being prior even to the publication of booklets, so memories of first hand witnesses may be the last place such knowledge resides.

By dealing in the broad brushstrokes of the history of the motivating beliefs and the actions of the major players of an entire movement, there are of course omissions of smaller scale initiatives which, whilst eminently worthy of attention, are not needed to support the argument of the bigger picture view. It would be beneficial, for example, to see similar studies of organizations such as Wren Music (whose development was largely parallel to that of Folkworks) in order to compare their methods and achievements. Innovation in folk music education did not end with the intervention of Folkworks either, although I maintain the

236 position that their work was the instigating factor in the last truly major shift in folk pedagogy to take place within England, thus forming a major influence on many of the organizations that have come into being since 1988. One such example would be Folk Southwest; Eddie Upton, founder of the organization, has stated that his time spent as the folk artist in residence at Gateshead’s Caedmon Hall during the early years of Folkworks’ rise to prominence, and being able to see the effectiveness of Anderson and Rigby’s new agency firsthand, was a major influence on his subsequent establishment of a folk arts development agency along similar lines in 1992, which now operates from Sherborne in Dorset.56 There are other ways in which a useful and functional fusion of disparate teaching styles have been employed by folk arts teaching bodies since the Folkworks model was evolved, and one useful extension of this study would be to assess the efforts of organization which have evolved their own solutions to the Sharp/Neal dichotomy. I would suggest that both Shooting Roots and Fosbrooks are worthy of such attention, as their practice models appear to be relatively unique.

Shooting Roots began to run peer-to-peer workshops by and for teenaged folk musicians at folk festivals during the early 1990s. The idea was for a youth-centric learning environment that would create a space for teenagers to explore folk music on their own terms, and although their workshops can tend towards an appearance verging on the chaotic to the outside observer, the continuing success of the organization speaks to a genuine demand for a safely haphazard and flexible space in which teenagers can encounter the folk arts in whatever way best suits them at the time; work that continues at Sidmouth Folk Week and Towersey Village Festival, as well as at residential workshops throughout the year.

The Fosbrooks Folk Education Trust of Stockport predates Folkworks arrival by almost eight years, and specializes in teaching Northwest clog dance styles accompanied by fiddle and piano accordion, with a dedicated costumed performance group of young people appearing at festivals around the country. They also adapted a combination of top-down and peer led approaches to Folk music education. Although headed by Liza Austin-Strange and a team of dedicated music teachers, much of the actual learning within the group is from participant to participant in what they describe as a ‘cascade method’, whereby older, more experienced members of the group teach the pre-determined instrumental parts or dance steps to the more novice participants.

56 Revealed in conversation with the author, on a park bench next to the children’s festival administration tent, Blackmore Gardens, Sidmouth Folkweek, 2014. 237

Using the ideas within this thesis to further current practice, my own youth vocal ensemble, Stream of Sound, has developed a workshop model for harmony singing that combines an experienced central figure coordinating the teaching process in a top down fashion, whilst members of the group teach the various parts simultaneously, peer-to-peer. Further members mix in amongst the workshop participants, adding confidant and supportive voices to bolster the participant’s sound and provide a feeling of instant achievement.57 This approach is staff intensive, as it takes a minimum of thirteen choir members to run a workshop in this manner: one coordinator, four teaching singers and eight supporting singers. However, the speed at which pieces from complex world harmony traditions can be learned by a group of complete beginners without any musical notation has lead to the workshops becoming an annual fixture at youth programme at Sidmouth Folk Week.

Whilst each of the educational approaches detailed in this thesis had both successes and failures during their time, it should be noted that they were all capable of delivering good results if properly tailored to the intended participants and delivered in the right context by competent and confidant music educators. No teaching method is ever inherently better than those who do the teaching — there is no way to proof against poor delivery— and thus we as folk arts practitioners must shake of the lingering notion that authentic folk teaching practice is a naturally shambolic and unreflexive undertaking. This is not to suggest that we should all defer to a caste of trained professionals, but rather that we should be open to actively examining our own situated practice, and continually allowing the ways in which we teach to evolve to best suit the current need. This need has been recognized in some quarters, as since 2010 the efforts of the EFDSS facilitated Folk Educators Group (FEG) has endeavored to establish better communication and co-operation between today’s practitioners. Through regularly scheduled contact at approximately three conference style events per year, an online forum and regular emails, the FEG seeks to ensure that we do not, as a community, remain ignorant of the ways in which contemporary folk education manifests itself nationwide: a networked tradition has a better collective memory.

Making lateral connections between contemporary folk arts practitioners provides a sounding board and touchstone for those actively engaged in the teaching of folk music, allowing them increase both their own and each others’ awareness of effective practice, but this cannot in

57 I do not claim sole credit for inventing or implementing this methodology, merely that discussions of this research have fed directly into the development. 238 itself sufficiently guard against the perpetual ‘re-inventing of the wheel’ that this thesis highlights in the successive waves of folk arts development over the last century. By extending our awareness backward to take in the practices of our educational forebears, we can consciously build upon those successful foundations rather than starting anew each time we feel the need for a change in our practice. It seems incongruous that a community of musicians whose contemporary efforts are largely authenticated by links to past performance practice should have such a limited understanding of the accompanying past pedagogical thinking; more than a century of organised teaching practice, with its inception now beyond living memory, represents a tradition in itself: one that we should be acknowledging. For these reasons, a historical overview of prior practice offers a useful contribution to the ongoing discussions and debates that groups such as the FEG are forming to foster. If we are, as both teachers and students of folk music, collectively determined to go forward with a commitment to maintaining an open minded and interconnected awareness of what it is that we do, then this thesis is presented in the hope of usefully illuminating the road behind us, to remind us where we have come from even as we take our tradition forward.

239 Bibliography

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241 Goss, J., Daily Express Community Song Book (London: Daily Express, 1927). Grattan Flood, W. H., History of Irish Music (Dublin: Browne & Nolan 1905). Hobsbawn, Eric & Terence Ranger, (eds.) The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Hobsbawn, E. J., Nations and nationalism since 1780: programme, myth, reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Harker, Dave, Fakesong: The Manufacture of British ‘Folksong’ 1700 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985). Hield, Fay, English Folk Singing and the Construction of Community (PhD thesis) (University of Sheffield, 2010). Howell, Martha & Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods (New York: Cornell University Press, 2001). Hugil, S., Shanties of the Seven Seas (Mystic: Mystic Seaport, 1994). Kidson, Frank & Mary Neal, English Folk-Song and Dance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915). Lave, Jean & Etienne Wenger, Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Leach, Robert, & Roy Palmer (eds.), Folk Music in School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). Lloyd, A.L., Come All Ye Bold Miners: Ballads and Songs of the Coalfields (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978). Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). MacColl, Ewan, Journeyman (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1990). MacMahon, Desmond, Nelson’s New National And Folk Song Book Part 1 (London: Thos. Nelson & Sons Ltd, 1938). MacMahon, Desmond, Nelson’s New National And Folk Song Book Part 2, (London: Thos. Nelson & Sons Ltd, 1939). MacMahon, Desmond, Youth and Music (London; Thos. Nelson & Sons, 1946). Macpherson, James, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996). MacKinnon, Niall, British Folk Scene: Musical Performance and Social Identity (Open University Press, 1993). Martin, Kate (ed.), Fèis: the first twenty-five years of the Fèis movement (Skye: Fèisean nan Gàidheal, 2006).

242 Morris, Pam (ed.), The Bakhtin Reader (London: Arnold, 2003). Mullen, Patrick B., The Man who Adores the Negro: Race and American Folklore (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008). Neal, Mary, The Espérance Morris Book: part 1 (London: Curwen, 1911). Neal, Mary, As a tale that is told, (Unpublished and undated autobiography, held in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, Cecil Sharp House). Newmarch, Rosa, Mary Wakefield: A Memoire (Kendall: Atkinson and Pollit, 1912). Nettl, Bruno & Helen Myers, Folk music in the United States: An introduction (3rd ed.) (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1976). Pratt, Mary L., Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). Pitts, Stephanie, A Century of Change in Music Education: Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Practice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). Postan, M. M., Fact and relevance: Essays on Historical Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). Ratcliff, T. P. (ed.), News Chronicle Song Book (London: News Chronicle Book Dept., 1935). Reed-Danahay, Deborah, (ed.), Auto/Ethnography: rewriting the self and the social (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997). Reeves, J., The Idiom Of The People: English Traditional Song from the MSS of Cecil Sharp (London: Heinemann Ltd, 1958). Robson, Colin, Real World Research: A Resource for Social Scientists and Practitioner- researchers (London: Wiley & Sons, 1993). Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). Schmitz, Oscar A. H., Das land Ohne Musik: Englische Gesellschaftsprobleme (Munich, 1904). Schofield, Derek, The First Week In August - Fifty Years Of The Sidmouth Festival (Sidmouth International Festival Ltd, 2004). Sharp, Cecil J. with Herbert C. MacIlwaine, The Morris Book: with a description of the dances as performed by the Morris Men of England (London: Novello, 1906). Sharp, Cecil J., English Folk-song: Some Conclusions (Wakefield: EP Publishing, 1972). Sharp, Cecil, Folk Dance In Schools (Pamphlet, London, 1913?). Sharp, Cecil, Folk Singing In Schools (Pamphlet, London, 1913). Shepherd, John & David Horn, Continuum encyclopaedia of popular music of the world (London: Continuum, 2003).

243 Suzuki, Shinʼichi, Elizabeth Mills & Therese Cecile Murphy, The Suzuki concept: An introduction to a successful method for early music education (Diablo Press Incorporated, 1973). Sweers, Britta, Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music (Oxford: OUP, 2005). Taylor, Malcolm & Doc Rowe, (eds.), Room, Room, Ladies and Gentlemen: An Introduction to the English Mummers' Play (London: EFDSS in assoc. with the Folklore Society, 2002). Tiddy, R. J., The Mummer’s Play (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923). Tosh, John, The Pursuit of History (3rd ed.) (London: Longman, 2002). Vaughan-Williams, Ursula, RVW: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams (London: Oxford University Press, 1964). Verrier, Michael, ‘Folk Club or Epic Theatre: Brecht’s influence on the Performance Practice of Ewan MacColl’, in Russell, Ian, and David Atkinson, (eds.), Folk Song: Tradition, Revival, and Re-Creation (Aberdeen: Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen, 2004). Weerth, Georg, A Young Revolutionary in Nineteenth Century England, Selected Writings of Georg Weerth (Berlin: Seven Seas Books, 1971). Wilgus, D. K., Anglo-American Folk-Song Scholarship Since 1898 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1959). Winstead, J. Lloyd , When Colleges Sang: The Story of Singing in American College Life (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2013).

BBC ‘Singing Together’ Booklets (Whilst 60 different Booklets were used to create the database for the analysis of the ‘Singing Together, the examples listed below are those for which the contents are expressly referenced in the thesis text).

Autumn Term, Singing Together, (BBC, 1953). Autumn Term, Singing Together, (BBC 1954). Summer Term, Singing Together (BBC, 1955). Autumn Term, Singing Together, (BBC 1955). Spring Term, Singing Together (BBC, 1958). Summer Term, Singing Together, (BBC, 1960). Spring Term, Singing Together, (BBC, 1961). Autumn Term, Singing Together, (BBC, 1961).

244 Autumn Term, Singing Together, (BBC, 1962). Autumn Term, Singing Together, (BBC, 1963). Spring Term, Singing Together, (BBC, 1967). Spring Term, Singing Together, (BBC, 1970). Spring Term, Singing Together (BBC, 1971). Summer Term, Singing Together, (BBC, 1971). Spring Term, Singing Together, (BBC, 1975). Summer Term, Singing Together, (BBC, 1975). Autumn Term, Singing Together, (BBC 1976). Spring Term, Singing Together, (BBC, 1976). Spring Term, Singing Together, (BBC, 1982). Spring Term, Singing Together, (BBC, 1985). Autumn Term, Singing Together, (BBC, 1987). Spring Term, Singing Together, (BBC, 1991).

Broadcast Media ‘Singing Together’, Archive on 4, BBC Radio 4, 29/11/14. ‘How Folk Songs Should Be Sung’, Culture Wise Production, BBC Radio 4, 07/01/2012. Come Clogdancing: Treasures of English Folk Dance’, Harry Benney, BBC4, 2011.

Journal Articles Anderson, Leon, ‘Analytic Autoethnography’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35/4 (2006), 373-395. Bearman, Christopher J., ‘Cecil Sharp in Somerset: Some Reflections on the Work of David Harker’, Folklore, 113/1 (Apr., 2002), 11-34. Bearman, Christopher J. ‘Who Were the Folk? The Demography of Sharp's Somerset Folk Singers’, The Historical Journal, 43/3 (2000), 751-775. Bohlman, Philip V., ‘Herder's Nineteenth Century’. Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 7 (2010), 3-21. Buzard, James, ‘On Auto-Ethnographic Authority’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 16/1 (2003), 61-91. Cannon, Roderick D., ‘What can we learn about piobaireachd?’, Ethnomusicology Forum, 4/1 (1995), 1-15.

245 Cox, Gordon, 'School music broadcasts and the BBC 1924 - 47', History of Education, 25/4 (1996), 363-371. Crook, David, ‘School Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: An Exploratory History’, Journal of Educational Administration and History, 39/3 (2007), 217-226. Delamont, Sara, ‘Arguments against autoethnography’, Qualitative Researcher, 4 (Feb. 2007). Delamont, Sara, ‘The only honest thing: autoethnography, reflexivity and small crises in fieldwork’, Ethnography and Education, 4/1 (2009), 51-63. Dekker, Rudolph, ‘Jacques Presser’s Heritage: Ego Documents in the Study of History’, Memoria y Civilazaçion, 5 (2002). Judge, Roy, ‘Mary Neal and the Espérance Morris’, Folk Music Journal, 5/5 (1989), 545-591. Gammon, Vic, ‘Folk song collecting in Sussex and Surrey 1843-1914’, History Workshop, 10 (Autumn 1980), 61-89. Gammon, Vic, ‘Many Useful Lessons: Cecil Sharp, Education and the Folk Dance Revival, 1899-1924’ Cultural and Social History, 5/1 (2008), 75–98. Goldschmidt, Walter, ‘Anthropology and the Coming Crisis: An Autoethnographic Appraisal.’ American Anthropologist, 79/2 (1977), 293–308. Gregory, E. David, ‘Starting Over: A.L. Lloyd and the Search for a New Folk Music, 1945- 49’, Canadian Journal for Traditional Music, 27 (1999/2000). Hayano, David, ‘Auto-Ethnography: Paradigms, Problems, and Prospects.’ Human Organization, 38/1 (Spring 1979), 99-104. Heider, Karl G., ‘What Do People Do? Dani Auto-Ethnography.’ Journal of Anthropological Research, 31/1 (Spring1 975), 3-17. Henry, Edward O. ‘Institutions for the Promotion of Indigenous Music: The Case for Ireland's Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann’, Ethnomusicology, 33/1 (1989), 67–95. Hufford, David J., The scholarly voice: Reflexivity in belief studies, Western Folklore, 54 (1995), 57-76. Karpeles, Maud, ‘Definition of Folk Music’, Journal of the International Folk Music Council, International Council for Traditional Music, 7 (1955), 6–7. Ngunjiri, F. W, K. C. Hernandez & H. Chang, ‘Living autoethnography: Connecting life and research [Editorial]’, Journal of Research Practice, 6/1 (2010), Article E1. O’Shea, Helen, ‘Getting to the Heart of the Music: Idealizing Musical Community and Irish Traditional Music Sessions’, Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, 2 (2006-7), 5- 7.

246 Ross, Ellen, ‘Disgruntled Missionaries: The Friendship of and Mary Neal and Emmeline Pethick Lawrence at the West London Mission’, The Mary Neal Project, 2009. Sky, Cathy Larson. ‘A Lot of Notes but Little Music: Competition and the Changing Character of Performance’. New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua 1/1 (1997), 156–167. Slocombe. Marie, ‘The BBC folk music collection’, Folk Song and Folk Music Archivist, Indiana State University, 7/1 (1964). Snape, Robert, 'Continuity, change and performativity in leisure: English folk dance and modernity 1900-1939', Leisure Studies, 28/3 (2009), 297-311. Tierney, William G., ‘Life History’s History: Subjects Foretold’, Qualitative Inquiry, 4 (1998), 49-70. Thorpe, Andrew, ‘The Membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1920–1945’. The Historical Journal, 43 (2000), 777-800. Valleley, Fintan, ‘Authenticity to Classicisation: The Course of Revival in Irish Traditional Music’, The Irish Review, 33 (2005), 51–69. Vryan, Kevin, ‘Expanding Analytic Autoethnography and Enhancing its Potential.’ Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35/4 (2006), 405-409. Wall, Sarah, ‘An autoethnography on learning about autoethnography’. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 5/2 (2006), Article 9, 3. Wilson, William A. ‘Herder, folklore and romantic nationalism.’ The Journal of Popular Culture, 6/4 (1973), 819-835. Yakhlef, Ali. ‘The three facets of knowledge: A critique of the practice-based learning theory.’ Research Policy, 39/1 (2010), 39-46.

Newspaper and Magazine Articles Anon., ‘A Folk Song Function’ Musical Times, 40/673 (March 1, 1899), 168. Anon, ‘Americans Learning English Folk Music’, Musical Herald, 758 (1st May 1911), 134. Anon., ‘Henry Walford Davies’, The Musical Times, 82/1178 (Apr., 1941), 159-160. Anon., ‘The Stratford-on-Avon Summer School of Folk-Song and Dance’, Musical Times, 52/824 (Oct 1, 1911), 651-654. Bonney, Stewart, ‘By popular request, the music plays on’, The Northumbrian, November 2008, 33-34. Child, William, ‘The National Welsh Eisteddfod’, The Musical Times, 60/919 (Sep. 1, 1919), 472-476. Kidson, Frank (writing as ‘The Collector’), ‘Folk-Song’, The Choir, 3/26 (February 1912), 30-31.

247 Moss, Mark D., “The first words. . .” Sing Out! The Folk Song Magazine, 40/1 (1995), 2. Nield, Martin, ‘Making Folk Work’, FolkRoots, 94/10 (April 1991), 31-33. Muireadhaigh, O, ‘Traditional Music’, Clogher Record, 1/1 (1953), 30. Robertson, Alec, ‘Walford Davies and the Ordinary Listener’, The Musical Times, 82/1178 (Apr., 1941), 129. Vaughan-Williams, R, ‘Sir Henry Walford Davis Obituary’, The Spectator, 13/03/41. Wakefield, A. M., ‘Foundation Stones of English Music’, Murray's Magazine, 4/22 (Oct. 1888), 489.

Web-based Resources

Daubney, Alison, with Rachel Elliot and Frances Watt, How Folk Music, Dance and Drama inspired learning in schools: case studies, outcomes and resources from the Full English learning project, (London: EFDSS, 2014), http://www.efdss.org/images/EFDSSASSETS/EFDSSEducationDownloads/FEreview.pdf (04/02/2016). Forbes, E., "Carey, Clive." The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. ed. S. Sadie. Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, (23/10/2017). Jacobs, A., "Toye, Geoffrey." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. (23/10/17). Gregory, Mark, ‘A. L. Lloyd Interviewed: Folk songs, Industrial Songs, the Folk Revival and other Musics’, Mustrad, 2009, http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/lloyd.htm, (07/03/2016). Hurd, M., "Somervell, Sir Arthur." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. (23/10/2017). Ward, David, ‘Talking Tunes’ Arts Guardian, November 1st 1982, http://www.alistairanderson.com/articles/guardian-1982.htm, (07/01/2016). Golding, Emma, ‘Second world war and paper rationing’, Guardian News Media Archive, http://www.theguardian.com/gnmeducationcentre/paper-rationing-second-world-war- teaching-resource-gnm-archive, 02/09/2013 (23/10/17). Oldfield, Lesley ‘Watch Gateshead Garden Festival videos 25 years on and share your pictures & memories’, ChronicleLive, http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/history/watch-gateshead-garden-festival-videos- 9041544, 13/05/2015 (04/01/2016).

248

249 Appendix: Content of BBC Singing Together Booklets

This appendix contains tabulated contents from each of the BBC Singing Together booklets used to compile the data for chapter 2.5. These are arranged chronologically by year, with the data from each chapter subsection separated by a new heading, and with some occasional half pages left blank to avoid tables from the same year appearing across multiple pages. Within each table, the songs are arranged in the order in which they were originally published in the booklet.

Notes:

Term: indicates the school term for which the booklet was published

Song Title: is self-explanatory.

Music and Lyrics denote the authors of each, where known. Lyrics labelled ‘Trad. (trans.)’ are an English translation of a traditional text which was originally in a different language. If the translator is known, then their name is also given. To be considered a traditional song for the purposes of this research, the song must have links to a source tradition, and thus either the music, lyrics or both must to be labelled as traditional. The were a few exceptions to this rule, such as the Geordie anthem ‘Blaydon Races’ which, although written for the music hall, has taken on all the functional hallmarks of a folk song within the North-East over the past century and a half.

Genre(s): denotes how the song was categorised within the database. Not all songs required labelling with multiple genres, but some, such as traditional folk carols, required two genre entries in order to locate them correctly.

Origin: denotes the country of origin, and was used to determine whether a song could be considered to come from a traditional source within the British Isles or not. If there was sufficient evidence to dispute or correct the stated origin, then the

250 correction is listed below. In the original databse, each song had an extensive section of notes detailing the decisions made.

Roud: an entry in this column shows that the song is catalogued in the , giving a good indication of Anglophone traditional origin. Entries with ‘v’ prefix are listed in the Roud Broadside Ballad index. Both indecese are currently available from the EFDSS website here: https://www.vwml.org/search/search-roud- indexes

NB: If no information could be found to either confirm or deny the authors or origins of a song as supplied appearing in a booklet, then the benefit of the doubt was granted to the original compiler, as they may well have had access to information which is no longer readily available.

251

Data from Section 2.5.1: 1940s BBC Singing Together Booklet Contents

Booklet(s) from 1948 Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Autumn Strawberry Fair Trad. Trad. Folk England 173 Vaughan Autumn Linden Lea Williams Barnes Art/National England Autumn Mowing the Barley Trad. Trad. Folk/English England 944 Autumn Donkey Riding Trad. Trad. Folk England 4540 Autumn Flowers in the Valley Trad. Trad. Folk England 26 Autumn Robin-A-Thrush Trad. Trad. Folk England 2792 Autumn My Love's an Arbutus Trad. Graves Art/Folk Ireland Autumn Gloucestershire Wassail Trad. Trad. Carol/Folk England 209 Autumn O Leave Your Sheep Trad. Trad. (trans.) Carol Belgian Ye Banks and Braes O' Bonny Autumn Doon Trad. Burns National/Folk Scotland Autumn New Year's Eve Trad. Oxenford National/Folk Wales Autumn Let Us With Gladsome Mind Antes Milton Hymn England Come Let Us To The Lord Our Autumn God Dougal? Morrison Hymn England Immortal, Invisible, God Only Chalmers- Autumn Wise Trad. Smith Hymn Wales Autumn Unto Us A Boy Is Born Trad. Trad. (trans.) Carol/Folk England

Data from Section 2.5.2: 1950s BBC Singing Together Booklet Contents

Booklet(s) from 1953 (NB: no booklets available from 1950/51/52) Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Autumn Brisk Young Widow, The Trad. Trad. Folk England 2438 Autumn Heart of Oak Boyce Garrick National England Autumn A-Roving Trad. Trad. Folk/Shanty England 649 Autumn Robin's Last Will, The Trad. Trad. Folk England 3900 Autumn Little Red Lark, The Trad. Trad. Folk England Folk/Nursery Autumn Old King Cole Trad. Trad. Rhyme England 1164 Autumn House in The Willows, The Brahms Trad. (trans.) Art/Folk Germany Autumn Who Is Sylvia Schubert Shakespeare Art England A Merry Christmas (we wish Autumn you) Trad. Trad. Carol England Autumn O Leave Your Sheep Trad. Trad. (trans.) Carol Belgium Autumn Nowell, Sing All We May Trad. Trad. Carol England Autumn Winter Trad. Trad. Carol Wales

252

Booklet(s) from 1954: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Autumn Boney Was A Warrior Trad. Trad. Folk/Shanty England 485 Autumn Kelvin Grove Trad. Trad. Folk Scotland Autumn Barley Mow Trad. Trad. Folk England 944 Autumn Hey Ho The Morning Dew Trad. Trad. Folk Ireland 11 Autumn Art Thou Troubled Handel Handel Art England Autumn High Germany Trad. Trad. Folk England 904 Bound For The Rio Autumn Grande Trad. Trad. Folk/Shanty England 317 Autumn Blow the Wind Southerly Trad. Trad. Folk England 2619 Autumn Come to Bethlehem Warlock Murray Carol England Autumn The Mistletoe Trad. Trad. Carol Wales Autumn Hungarian Carol Trad. Trad. (trans.) Carol Hungary Jesus, Jesus, Rest Your Autumn Head Trad. Trad. Carol America

Booklet(s) from 1955: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Summer Begone Dull Care Historical Historical Art/C17th England Summer Here’s the Summer Purcell Purcell Art/C17th England Summer Mermaid, The Trad. Trad. Folk England 124 Summer Old Chariot, The Trad. Trad. Folk/Shanty England 3632 Summer Waltzing Matilda Cowen Patterson National Australia Summer Poor Old Horse Trad. Trad. Folk/Shanty England 513 Summer Rising of the Lark, The Trad. Whittaker? Folk/Art Wales Summer My Love’s an Arbutus Trad. Graves Art/Folk Ireland Louis Summer Skye Boat Song Macleod Stephenson National/Art Scotland Summer Aikin Drum Trad. Trad. Folk Scotland 2571 Autumn N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A Ho-Ro! My Nut-Brown Autumn Maiden Trad. Blackie Folk/Art Scotland Meeting of the Waters, Autumn The Trad. Moore National/Folk Ireland Autumn Twankydillo Trad. Trad. Folk England 2409 Autumn St. Athan Trad. Trad. Folk Wales Autumn Golden Slumbers Historical Historical Lullaby/C17th England Vaughan Autumn Linden Lea Williams Barnes National/Art Autumn Sweet Nightingale Trad. Trad. Folk England 371 Autumn A Virgin Most Pure Trad. Trad. Carol/Folk England 1378 The Infant King Trad. Autumn (Basque Noel) Trad. (trans.) Carol Spain Autumn 12 Days of Christmas Trad. Trad. Carol/Folk England 68

253

Booklet(s) from 1958: (NB: no booklets available from 1956/57) Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Spring Bonny Blue-Eyed Sailor Dunhil/Trad. Fyleman Shanty/Folk England Spring Water of Tyne, The Trad. Trad. Folk England 1364 Wraggle Taggle Gipsies Spring (sic) Trad. Trad. Folk England 1 Spring Early One Morning Trad. Trad. Folk England 12682 Spring Ye Banks and Braes Trad. Burns National/Folk Scotland Spring Planting Trees Trad. I. Holst Folk England Spring Wandering Miller, The Schubert Nelson Art Germany Spring Keeper, The Trad. Trad. Folk England 1519 Drummer & the Cook, Spring The Trad. Trad. Shanty/Folk England 3136 Fiske Spring Kathleen Tyrell Trad. (trans.) Folk Ireland

Booklet(s) from 1959: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Autumn Dear Harp of Erin Trad. Weir Folk/National Ireland Autumn Derby Ram, The Trad. Trad. Folk England 126 Autumn Billy Barlow Trad. Trad. Folk America Brahms/Tra Autumn Lady Bird, The d. Whiting National/Folk Germany Autumn Hundred Pipers, The Trad. Nairne Folk/National Scotland The Song of the Sailor Autumn Lad Trad. Kluge Folk/National Wales Autumn Joseph and the Angel Terry Trad. Carol/Folk England Whence Come You, Fulton Autumn Shepherd Maiden Trad. Fowke Carol England Autumn In Nightly Stillness Trad. Sliwinski Carol Poland Armstron Autumn Tyrolean Cradle Song Trad. g, (trans.) Carol Austria

254

Data from Section 2.5.3: 1960s BBC Singing Together Booklet Contents

Booklet(s) from 1960: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Trad. Summer Cuckoo, The Trad. (trans.) Round/Folk France Trad. Summer Ho-La –Hi Trad. (trans.) Folk Germany Summer High Germany Trad. Trad. Folk England 904 Uhland, (trans. Summer Blacksmith, The Brahms Latham) Art Germany Summer Old Mister Noah Perry Perry Biblical England Yellow Beaked Blackbird, Trad. Summer The Trad. (trans.) Folk Wales There’s Nae Luck About Summer the House Adam Adam National Scotland Summer Little Red Waggon, the Trad. Trad. Folk America Summer Harp That Once, The Trad. Moore Folk Ireland

Booklets from 1961: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Spring Kate Trad. Gittings Folk Spain Spring Welcome to Spring Schumann England Art Germany Lincolnshire Poacher, Spring The Trad. Trad. Folk England Spring Men of Harlech Trad. Trad. Folk Wales Spring Darby Kelly Trad. Dibdin Folk Ireland Spring Greenland Fisheries Trad. Trad. Folk America 347 Spring Mowing The Barley Trad. Trad. Folk England 944 Spring Faithful Johnny Trad. Grant? Folk Scotland Spring Li’l Liza Jane Trad. Trad. Folk America Autumn Saucy Sailor Trad. Trad. Folk England 531 Dashing Away with the Autumn Smoothing Iron Trad. Trad. Folk England 869 Autumn Fisherman’s Night Song Trad. Strong Art/Folk England Folk/Nurser Autumn This Old Man Trad. Trad. y Rhyme England 3550 Autumn Aiken Drum Trad. Trad. Folk Scotland 2571 Autumn Fox and the Hare, The Kjerulf Kluge Art Iceland Autumn On This Day Trad. Trad. (trans.) Carol Wales Autumn Holly and the Ivy, The Trad. Trad. Carol England 2004 Autumn Holy Son, The Hurford More Carol England Autumn Down in Yon Forest Trad. Trad. Carol England 1523 Autumn Wassail Song Trad. Trad. Carol England 209 V9595 Alban (B’side Autumn Rejoice and Be Merry Hinton Trad. Carol England index)

255

Booklets from 1962: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Spring Andulko The Goosegirl Trad. Fiske (trans.) Folk Czech Folk/Nurser Spring Turn The Glasses Over Trad. Trad. y Rhyme America Spring Trad. Trad. Folk England 1239 Bound For The Rio Spring Grande Trad. Trad. Folk/Shanty England 317 Spring Elsie Marley Trad. Trad. Folk England 3065 Spring Bonnie Dundee Trad. Scott Folk Scotland Spring Heart of Oak Boyce Garrick National England National/ Spring Flight of the Earls, The Trad. Graves Folk Ireland Folk/ Spring Springtime Is Returning Trad. Maynard National Wales Spring Happiness Schubert Art/National Germany Be Kind, Gentle Trad. Arr. Summer Shepherdess Brahms Trad. (trans.) Art/Folk Germany Summer All Through the Night Trad. Trad. Folk Wales Summer John Barleycorn Trad. Trad. Folk England 164 Music Summer Camptown Races Foster Foster Hall/Folk America Summer Evening Music Trad. Henschel Folk Germany What Shall We Do With Summer the Drunken Sailor Trad. Trad. Folk/Shanty England 322 Folk/ Summer Boatie Rows, The Trad. Ewen? National Scotland National/ Autumn British Grenadiers, The Trad. Trad. C18th England Folk/ Autumn Loudly Proclaim Trad. Maynard National Wales Autumn Blow the Wind Southerly Trad. Trad. Folk England 2619 Autumn Mallow , The Trad. Trad. Folk England Autumn Trees in England, The Wood Wood Art England Autumn John Brown Winner Winner Music Hall America Autumn Pilgrim Caravan, The Hassel Arnold Carol England Autumn Noel Beloc Beloc Carol/Art England God Rest Ye Merry, Autumn Gentlemen Trad. Trad. Carol/Folk England 394 Autumn I Saw Three Ships Trad. Trad. Carol/Folk England 700 Autumn In Bethlehem Town Trad. Trad. (trans.) Carol France

256

Booklets from 1963: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Folk/ Autumn Robin Adaire Trad. Burns National Scotland Autumn Captain Jinks Music Hall Music Hall Popular America Autumn Boatmen Dance Music Hall Music Hall Popular America Autumn Twankydillo Trad. Trad. Folk England 2409 Autumn Flower of Killarney Trad. Trad. Folk Ireland Autumn Down in Demerara Music Hall Music Hall Popular America Autumn Kelvin Grove Trad. Lyle Folk Scotland Unattributed Autumn Birdcatchers Song, The Mozart Germany

Booklets from 1965 (NB: no booklets available from 1964): Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Alabama (John Shanty/ Spring Cherokee) Trad. Hugil? Folk America 4693 Spring Cargoes Shaw Masefield Art England Spring Cobbler and the Crow Trad. Brooks Folk England Spring Captain Morgan's March Trad. Dobbs Folk Wales Spring El Vito Trad. Trad. (trans.) Folk Spain Spring Kitty of Coleraine Trad. Trad. Folk Ireland 6534 Spring Johnny Crack Metcalf Thomas Art Wales Spring Oak and the Ash, The Trad. Trad. Folk/C17th England 1367 Folk/ Spring Ye Banks and Braes Trad. Burns National Scotland National/ Spring O Susanna Foster Foster Music Hall America

257

Booklets from 1967 (NB: no booklets available from 1966): Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Lincolnshire Poacher, Autumn The Trad. Trad. Folk England 299 Autumn Brennan on the Moor Trad. Trad. Folk Ireland 476 Folk/ Autumn A-Roving Trad. Trad. Shanty England Autumn Faithful Johnny Trad. Grant? Folk Scotland Once a Farmer and his Autumn Wife Trad. Trad. Folk Wales 16831 Autumn Hundred Pipers, The Trad.? Nairne Folk Scotland Folk/ Nursery Autumn Michael Finnegan Trad. Trad. Rhyme England 10541 Autumn Pine Tree, The Trad. Henschel Carol/Folk Germany Radcliff Autumn Past Three O' Clock Trad. Woodward Carol/Folk England Autumn He Is Born Trad. Henschel Carol/Folk France Autumn Merrily to Bethlehem Trad. Sliwinski Carol/Folk Poland Autumn Wassail Song Trad. Trad. Carol/Folk England Spring Jolly Carter, The Trad. Trad. Folk England Spring Lillibulero Trad. Trad. Folk/C17th England 160? Spring Lisa Lân Trad. Trad. (trans.) Folk Wales Spring Keys of Canterbury, The Trad. Trad. Folk England Spring 's Servants Trad. Trad. Folk England 130 Spring Old Farmer Buck Trad. Trad. Folk England Spring Queen Mary Trad. Trad. Folk Scotland 6281 Spring Twankydillo Trad. Trad. Folk England 2409 Spring Ho-La –Hi Trad. Trad. (trans.) Folk Germany Spring Jim along Josie Trad. Trad. Folk America 4618

258 Booklets from 1968: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Spring Mowing The Barley Trad. Trad. Folk England 944 Spring Li’l Liza Jane Trad. Trad. Folk America She'll be Comin' Round Spring the Mountain Trad. Trad. Folk America Spring Men of Harlech Trad. Trad. Folk Wales Spring Sacramento Trad. Trad. Folk/Shanty England Trad. Arr. Vaughan Spring Williams Trad. Art/Folk England Spring Hieland Laddie Trad. Trad. Folk Scotland Spring Keel Row, The Trad. Trad. Folk England Stephens & Folk/Music Spring Botany Bay Trad. Yardley Hall Australia Spring My Own Pretty Boy Trad. Lyell Folk Ireland Summer Marianina Trad. Hoare Folk Italy Summer Flowers in the Valley Trad. Trad. Folk England 26 Summer Leaver her Johnny Trad. Trad. Folk/Shanty England Summer Darby Kelly Trad. Dibdin Folk Ireland 21859 Summer Lonely and far Away Unknown Unknown Unknown Unknown Dashing White Summer Sergeant, The Trad. Roberton Folk Scotland Folk/Music Summer Bells of Aberdovey, The Trad. Dibdin Hall Wales

Data from Section 2.5.4: 1970s BBC Singing Together Booklet Contents

Booklets from 1970 (NB: no booklets available from 1969): Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Spring Happiness Schubert Unknown Art Germany Folk/ Spring Jennie Jenkins Trad. Trad. Nursery Rhyme America Spring Tree in the Wood, The Trad. Trad. Folk England Spring Stranger in Cork, The Trad. Kluge Folk Ireland Spring Mango Walk Trad. Trad. Calypso Jamaica Andulko the Goose Trad. Spring Girl Trad. (trans.) Folk Czech Spring Cavalry of the Steppes Knipper Rome? National Russia Spring Old Zip Coon Trad. Stevens Folk/Music Hall America Spring Bonnie Dundee Trad. Scott Folk Scotland Spring Llangollen Market Trad. Trad. Folk Wales

259 Booklets from 1971: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Vaughan Summer Linden Lea Williams Barnes Art/National England Summer Morris Men Trad. Hitchcock Folk Wales Summer Meadowlands, The Trad. Fullerton Folk Czech Folk/Nursery Summer One Man Went to Mow Trad. Trad. Rhyme England Summer Tramping Song Trad. Hitchcock Folk Ireland Summer Donkey Riding Trad. Trad. Folk/Shanty England 4540 Summer Pretty Pena Trad. Boardman Folk Top of the Morning, Summer The Trad. Roberton Folk Scotland

Booklets from 1972: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud As I was Going Along Summer the Road Trad. Trad. Folk Ireland 27 Trad. Summer Reap the Flax Trad. (trans.) Folk Sweden Summer Gypsies, The Trad. Hitchcock Folk Scotland 1 Summer Loudly Proclaim Trad. Maynard Folk Wales Trad. Summer Taffta Hindi Trad. (trans.) Folk Lebanon Summer No Other Moon Cearense? Castiglione Folk Brazilian Summer Fire Down Below Trad. Trad. Folk/Shanty England Water Come A Me Summer Eye Trad. Trad. Folk Jamaica

Booklets from 1973: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Spring Far in the Forest Trad. Markham Folk Finland Spring Gypsy Rover, The Trad. Trad. Folk Ireland 1 Song of the Western Hawker/ Spring Men Hawker Trad. National England Trad. Spring Eriskay Love Lilt Trad. (trans.) Folk Scotland Trad. Spring Heron from Brecon Trad. (trans.) Folk Wales Spring An Austrian Landler Trad. Hoare Folk Austria Spring Tortilla Vendor Trad. Fullerton Folk Chile Spring Vreneli Trad. Synge Folk Switzerland Trad. Spring Mountain Dancer Trad. (trans.) Folk Czech Spring In A Gondola Trad. Hoare Folk Italy Spring O Rare Turpin Trad. Trad. Folk England 621

260 Booklets from 1974: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Emlyn- Spring Joy of Springtime Coombes? Edwards Bespoke England Trad. Spring Cuckoo Trad. (trans.) Folk Austria Emlyn- Spring Running Song Coombes? Edwards Bespoke Spring Derby Ram, The Trad. Trad. Folk England 126 Spring Tum Balalyka Trad. Rubin Folk Russia Spring Simple Gifts Joseph Jospeh Hymn America Spring Li’l Liza Jane Trad. Trad. Folk America Spring Leprahaun (sic), The Trad. Hughes Folk Ireland Spring Tinker's Wedding, The Trad. Watts Folk Scotland 5408 Lincolnshire Poacher, Spring The Trad. Trad. Folk England 299 Spring Strike the Bell Trad. Trad. Folk/Shanty England 4190 Folk/Music Autumn Cockles and Mussels Trad. Trad. Hall Scotland Old Man Who Lived in Autumn the Woods, The Trad. Trad. Folk England 283 Wark O' The Weavers, Autumn The Trad. Shaw Folk Scotland Autumn Some Folks Do Foster Foster Music Hall America Trad. Autumn Handsome Butcher, The Trad. (trans.) Folk Hungary Emlyn- Autumn Mountain Duel Coombes? Edwards Bespoke Autumn Excelsis! Gloria Unknown Unknown Carol Belgium Autumn Cherry Tree Carol, The Trad. Trad. Carol/Folk England 453 Carnal and the Crane, Autumn The Trad. Trad. Carol/Folk England 306 Search for Lodging, Trad. Autumn The Trad. (trans.) Carol Mexico Trad. Autumn Jesu is Crying Trad. (trans.) Carol Brazilian

261 Booklets from 1975: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Trad. Spring Sambalele Trad. (trans.) Folk Brazilian Spring Road the the Isles, The Trad. MacLeod Folk Scotland Trad. Spring Zum Gali Gali Trad. (trans.) Folk Israel Spring Song, The Trad. Trad. Folk England 330 Spring Migildi Magildi Trad. Dobbs Folk Wales Spring Tiritiomba Trad. Bayley Folk Italy Spring Kalinka Larionov? Pitfield National/Folk Russia Bound For South Spring Australia Trad. Trad. Shanty/Folk England 325 Spring Patrick on the Railroad Trad. Trad. Shanty America 208 Spring Polly Oliver Trad. Trad. Folk England 367 Spring O Waly Waly Trad. Trad. Folk England 87 Emlyn- Summer Pedro Go Go Pescador Trad. Edwards Folk Portugal Emlyn- Summer Silver Wheat, the Trad. Edwards Folk Wales Summer Marianina Trad. Hoare Folk Italy Roaring Roaring Summer Mary Ann Lion Lion Calypso Trinidad Summer Mallow Fling, The Trad. Unknown Folk England Summer Scarborough Fair Trad. Trad. Folk England 12 Summer MacPherson's Farewell Trad. Trad. Folk Scotland Wraggle Taggle Summer Gipsies (sic) Trad. Trad. Folk England 1 Netherland Autumn Four Little Weavers Trad. Hitchcock Folk s Autumn Stuttering Lovers, The Trad. Trad. Folk Ireland Trad. Autumn Ho-La –Hi Trad. (trans.) Folk Germany Barnyards O' Delgaty, Autumn The Trad. Trad. Folk Scotland Autumn Town Trad. Trad. Folk Wales 1416 Autumn Oliver Cromwell Trad. Trad. Folk England 797 Kennicott Kennicott Autumn Carol of the Drum Davis Davis Carol/Art America Autumn Masters in this Hall Marais Morris Carol/Art England Armstrong Autumn Tyrolean Cradle Song Trad. , trans Carol Austria Autumn Hey Little Bull Trad. Green Carol/Folk Brazilian Shepherds leave your Autumn Flocks Coombes Coombes Carol England

262 Booklets from 1976: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Spring Iron Horse, The Trad. Balfour Folk Scotland 5834 Spring Casey Jones Trad. Saunders Folk America 3247 Folk/Nursery West Spring Tinga layo Trad. Trad. Rhyme Indies Spring Spanish Serenade Trad. Hitchcock Folk Spain Spring She's Like the Swallow Trad. Trad. Folk Canada Spring Tarantella Trad. Brace Folk Italy Spring A-Roving Trad. Trad. Folk/Shanty England 3601 Spring Old Turf Fire Trad. Trad. Folk England 8215 Spring Must I Then Trad. Haufrecht Folk Germany Emlyn- Spring Bard of Eve Trad. Edwards Folk Wales Emlyn- Spring Quinoro's Pearl Trad. Edwards Folk Philippines Summer Drover's Dream, The Trad. Trad. Folk Australia 5473 Summer Yellow Bird Trad. Trad. Folk Jamaica In Summer the sun Summer Shines Brightest Trad. Trad. Folk Sweden Summer Newcastle Fair Trad. Trad. Folk Ireland Emlyn- Summer Wild White Rose, The Trad. Edwards Folk/Bespoke Wales Mingulay Boat Song, Summer The Trad. Roberton Folk/National Scotland Emlyn- Summer Brave Topolini Unknown Edwards Bespoke Italy Blow Away the Summer Morning Dew Trad. Trad. Folk England 11 O I Did Climb a Tree- Trad. Autumn top Trad. (trans.) Folk Germany Folk/Nursery Autumn Old Mister Tucker Trad. Trad. Rhyme England Autumn Fox, The Trad. Trad. Folk England 131 Louis Autumn Skye Boat Song MacLeod Stephenson Art/National Scotland Autumn If I Was a Blackbird Trad. Trad. Folk Ireland 387 Trad. Autumn All Through the Night Trad. (trans.) Carol/Folk Wales Autumn Pine Tree, The Trad. Henschel Carol/Folk Germany Now In Bethlehem Autumn Mary Tarried Unknown Unknown Carol Mexico Trad. Autumn Bagpiper's Carol, The Trad. (trans.) Carol Italy Gloucestershire Autumn Wassail Trad. Trad. Carol/Folk England 209 Shepherds of the Autumn Hillside Unknown Unknown Carol Venezuela

263 Booklets from 1977: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Spring Pearly Adriatic, The Trad. Williams Folk Yugoslavia Spring Streets of Laredo, The Trad. Trad. Folk America 23650 Pay Me my Money Spring Down Trad. Trad. Folk America 21449 Spring Shuttle Rins, The Trad. Trad. Folk Scotland Spring I Wander Trad. MacMahon Folk Denmark Spring Cosher Bailey Trad. Trad. Folk Wales 4830 Spring Water of Tyne, The Trad. Trad. Folk England 1364 Leaving of Liverpool, Spring The Trad. Trad. Folk/Shanty England 9435 Spring Donkey's Burial, The Trad. Horton Folk Spain Spring Evening Music Trad. Henschel Folk Germany Spring Kitty of Coleraine Trad. Trad. Folk Ireland 6534

Booklets from 1978:

Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Summer Linstead Market Trad. Trad. Folk Jamaica Folk/ Summer Erie Canal, The Allen Trad. Music Hall America Emlyn- Summer Yellow Sheepskin, The Trad. Edwards Folk Wales Farewell My Own True Summer Love Trad. Trad. Folk America 422 Trad. Summer In My Father's Garden Trad. (trans.) Folk France Folk/ Summer Blaydon Races Ridley Ridley Music Hall England 3511 Summer Nature Carol Trad. Sargeant Folk Philippines Summer Quaker's Wife, The Trad. Trad. Folk Scotland 6479 Greenland Whale Folk/ Spring Fishery, The Trad. Trad. Shanty America 347 Spring Little Red Bird Trad. Trad. Folk Spring Bonnie Dundee Trad. Scott Folk Scotland Spring Llangollen Market Trad. Trad. Folk Wales Spring Mango Walk Trad. Trad. Calypso Jamaica Folk/ Spring Drill, Ye Tarriers Trad. Casey Shanty America Garden Where the Folk/ Spring Praties Grow Trad. Patterson Music Hall Ireland Spring Cavalry of the Steppes Knipper Rome? National Russia Spring Trad. Trad. Folk America 330 Spring Pierlala Trad. Fullerton Folk Belgium Spring Ifca's Castle Trad. Jackson? Folk Czech

264 Booklets from 1979: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Spring Pedlar, The Trad. Krone Folk Russia Folk/Nursery Spring Ould John Braddlum Trad. Trad. Rhyme England 1857 Come and Sing Spring Together Trad. Krone Folk Hungary Spring Charlie is M'Darling Trad. Nairne Folk Scotland 5510 Shepherd and his Dog, Spring The Trad. Kluge Folk Wales Spring Pat of Mullingar Trad. Trad. Folk Ireland Water Come A Me Spring Eye Trad. Trad. Folk Jamaica Spring Marigold, The Trad. Trad. Folk England 951 Spring Be Still My Heart Trad. Botsford Folk Croatia Spring Sir Eglamore Trad. Trad. Folk England 29 Spring Chiapanecas Trad. Fullerton Folk Mexico Summer Pretty Pena Trad. Boardman Folk Mexico Summer Meadowlands, The Trad. Fullerton Folk Czech Summer Appezöller's Song Trad. MacMahon Folk Switzerland Summer La Pique Trad. Trad. Folk/Shanty England 2563 Summer Morris Men Trad. Hitchcock Folk Wales Summer Will You Go Lassie Trad. McPeake Folk Scotland 541 Beautiful City of Summer Sligo, The Trad. Graves Folk Ireland Summer Crocodile, The Trad. Trad. Folk England 866 Autumn Sugar Candy McPeake McPeake Folk Scotland 19019 Folk/Nursery Autumn I Have Four Sisters Trad. Trad. Rhyme England 36 Autumn Rommel Drum, The Trad. Krone Folk Belgium Autumn German Band, The Trad. Unknown Folk Denmark Autumn Gypsy Davy Trad. Trad. Folk America 1 Autumn Lullaby Trad. Graves Folk Ireland Autumn Poverty Carol Trad. Trad. (trans.) Carol/Folk Wales Autumn Earth's Joy Trad. Sargeant Carol/Folk Mexico Autumn Rocky, Rocky Road Trad. Dobbs Carol/Folk West Indies Barham Autumn Two Shepherds Trad. Johnson Carol/Folk Germany Autumn I Wonder As I Wander Trad. Niles Carol/Folk America

265 Data from Section 2.5.5: 1980s BBC Singing Together Booklet Contents

Booklets from 1980:

Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Folk/Nurser Spring Jennie Jenkins Trad. Trad. y Rhyme America Spring Lucerne To Weggis Trad. MacMahon Folk Switzerland Spring Heron from Brecon Trad. Mair Folk Wales Folk/

Nursery Spring Johnny Todd Trad. Trad. Rhyme England 1102 Spring Diamond, The Trad. Trad. Folk/Shanty Scotland 2172 Emlyn- Spring Carmen, Carmela Trad. Edwards Folk Mexico Emlyn- Spring Ma Bela Bimba Trad. Edwards Folk Italy Kathryn's Wedding Spring Party Unknown Unknown Unknown Germany Folk/ Nursery Spring Sleep My Little Baby Trad. Unknown Rhyme Spain Ching-a-ling, Tonk! Emlyn- Spring Tonk! Trad. Edwards Folk Czech As I was Going Along Spring the Road Trad. Trad. Folk Ireland 27 Summer Gypsy Rover, The Trad. Trad. Folk Ireland 1 Emlyn- Summer Moon of Mamaku Trad. Edwards Folk Philippines Summer No Other Moon Cearense? Castiglione Folk Brazilian Summer Three Pirates, The Trad. Unknown Folk/Shanty England Summer Tuneful Guitar, The Trad. Hoare Folk Italy Folk/ Summer Uist Tramping Song Bannerman Roberton National Scotland Summer Llantwit Major Trad. Williams Folk Wales Emlyn- Summer Ahrirang Trad. Edwards Folk Korea Autumn Farewell to Fiunary Trad. MacLeod Folk Scotland Emlyn- Autumn Hopak, The Trad. Edwards Folk Russia Autumn Reap the Flax Trad. Unknown Folk Sweden Autumn Captain Nipper Trad. Trad. Folk/Shanty England Autumn Who Did Trad. Trad. Folk America Autumn Kelly the Pirate Healy Trad. Folk Ireland 529 Autumn Friendly Beasts, The Trad. Heller Carol/Folk England Virgin Mary Had a Autumn Baby Boy Trad. Trad. Carol West Indies O Sleep My Pretty Emlyn- Autumn Baby Trad. Edwards Carol/Folk Mexico Autumn Rise Up, Shepherd Trad. Trad. Carol/Folk America 15289 Autumn Gower Wassail, The Trad. Trad. Carol/Folk Wales 209

266 Booklets from 1981: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Song of a Country Emlyn- Spring Girl Trad. Edwards Folk Wales Emlyn- Spring Mountain Dancer Trad. Edwards Folk Czech Spring Tortilla Vendor, The Trad. Fullerton Folk Chile Spring La Cucaracha Trad. Trad. (trans.) Folk Mexico Here Come the Spring Navvies Trad. Campbell Folk Ireland Spring Piper O' Dundee, The Trad. Trad. Folk Scotland Spring Greek Shepherd Song Trad. Unknown Folk Greek V20656 Alnwick Football (B’side Spring Song Trad. Trad. Folk England Archive) Mountains I Love, Emlyn- Spring The Trad. Edwards Folk Switzerland Spring Mountain Skier, The Unknown Unknown Unknown Austria Spring Troika Trad. Unknown Folk Russia Ship That Never Summer Returned, The Trad. Clay Worth Folk England 775 Summer Fireman's Song, The Bilston Bilston Folk England Summer My White Horse Trad. Trad. (trans.) Folk Chile Summer Lewis Bridal Song Trad. Roberton Folk Scotland Summer Spinning Wheel, The Trad. Waller Folk/National Ireland Emlyn- Summer Angelico Trad. Edwards Folk Haiti Summer Peanut Vendor, The Simons Simons National/Folk Cuba Summer Lisa Lân Trad. Trad. (trans.) Folk Wales

267 Booklets from 1982: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Spring Vreneli Trad. Trad. (trans.) Folk Switzerland Emlyn- Spring Joy of Springtime Trad. Edwards Folk Wales Spring Strike the Bell Trad. Trad. Folk/Shanty England 4190 Spring Leprechaun, The Trad. Joyce Folk Ireland 5274 Spring Per Spelman Trad. Krone Folk Norway Old Man Who Lived Spring in the Woods, The Trad. Trad. Folk England 283 Spring Tzena, Tzena Miron Chagiz National Israel Spring Brian O'Lin Trad. Trad. Folk Ireland 294 Song of the Parro, Spring The Unknown Unknown National Spring Chu-Lu-Lu Trad. Trad. (trans.) Folk Polynesia Spring Happy Fiesta, The Trad. Unknown National Mexico Hey Ho, the Morning Autumn Dew Trad. Trad. Folk Ireland 11 Autumn Zum Gali Gali Trad. Trad. (trans.) Folk Israel Autumn Miller of Dee, The Trad. Trad. Folk England 503 Autumn Migildi Magildi Trad. Dobbs Folk Wales Folk/ Autumn Westering Home Trad. Roberton National Scotland Autumn Jolly Pedlar Trad. Unknown Folk Norway Born On Earth is the Autumn Child Divine Trad. Trad. (trans.) Carol/Folk France Autumn Wassail Song Trad. Trad. Carol/Folk England 209 Kennicott Kennicott Autumn Carol of the Drum Davis Davis Carol/Art Czech Up! Good Christen Ratcliffe Autumn Folk Trad. Woodward Carol/Folk England Shepherds leave your Carol/ Autumn Flocks Coombes Coombes Bespoke Puerto Rico

268 Booklets from 1983: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Tinker's Wedding, Spring The Trad. Watts Folk Scotland 5408 Spring Waltzing Matilda Cowen Patterson National Australia Spring Kalinka Larianov Pitfield National Russia Folk/ Spring Cockles and Mussels Trad. Trad. Music Hall Scotland Spring Swansea Town Trad. Trad. Folk Wales 1416 Spring Derby Ram, The Trad. Trad. Folk England 126 Oh, 'twas in the Spring Broad Atlantic Mallet Bolingbroke National England Candlelight Spring Fisherman, The Trad. Kennedy Folk England West Spring Island in the Sun Belafonte Burgess Pastiche Indies? Spring Marianina Trad. Hoare Folk Italy My Grandfather's Popular/ Spring Clock Clay Work Clay Work Music Hall America Summer Star of County Down Trad. McGarvey Folk Ireland 4801 A Life on the Ocean National/ Summer Wave Sargent Russel Music Hall America Trad. Summer Sambalele Trad. (trans.) Folk Brazil and Summer Little John Trad. Trad. Folk England 1520 Trad./McL Folk/ Summer Road to the Isles ennan MacLeod National Scotland Summer Widdicombe Fair Trad. Trad. Folk England 137 Summer Dona, Dona Trad. Trad. Folk America Emlyn- Summer Silver Wheat, The Trad. Edwards Folk Wales Patrick on the Summer Railroad Trad. Trad. Folk America 208 Autumn Fox, The Trad. Trad. Folk England 131 Autumn Cosher Bailey Trad. Trad. Folk Wales 4830 Autumn Shuttle Rins, The Trad. Trad. Folk Scotland Yellow Rose of J K (only Autumn Texas Trad. initials) Folk America Autumn Bill Bones' Hornpipe Trad. Bodey Folk Germany Autumn Kitty of Coleraine Trad. Trad. Folk Ireland 6534 Autumn Christmas is Coming Trad. Trad. Carol/Folk England Huron Indian Carol, Autumn The Trad. Middleton Carol Canada Trad. Autumn Bagpiper's Carol, The Trad. (trans.) Carol/Folk Italy Holly and the Ivy, Autumn The Trad. Trad. Carol/Folk England 2004 Autumn Joy to the World Handel Watts Carol England

269 Booklets from 1984: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud MacPherson's Summer Farewell Trad. Trad. Folk Scotland 2160 Keith/ Summer Yellow Bird Trad. Bergman Folk Jamaica Soloviov- Matusovsky Summer Moscow Evening Sedoi (trans.) National Russia Summer Rew Di Ranno Trad. Trad. (trans.) Folk Wales Summer Potato, The Trad. Trad. Folk Ireland Summer Bay of Biscay, The Trad. Trad. Folk England 24928 Pedro Go Go Emlyn- Summer Pescador Trad. Edwards Folk Portugal Emlyn- Summer Quinoro's Pearl Trad. Edwards Folk Philippines

Booklets from 1985: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Streets of Laredo, Summer The Trad. Trad. Folk America 23650 Leaving of Summer Liverpool, The Trad. Trad. Folk/Shanty England 9435 Summer Sloop John B., The Trad. Trad. Folk Nassau Summer Once A Farmer Trad. Trad. Folk Wales 16831 Song of Lieutenant Summer Kijé Prokofiev Unknown Art Russia Summer Scotland The Brave Trad. Hanley Folk Scotland Phil The Fluthers's Summer Ball French French Folk Ireland Banana Boat Song, Summer The Trad. Trad. Folk Jamaica Tinker's Wedding, Spring The Trad. Watts Folk Scotland 5408 Spring Waltzing Matilda Cowen Patterson National Australia National/ Spring Kalinka Larianov Pitfield Folk Russia Spring Cockles and Mussels Trad. Trad. Folk Scotland Spring Swansea Town Trad. Trad. Folk Wales 1416 Spring Derby Ram, The Trad. Trad. Folk England 126 Oh, 'twas in the National/ Spring Broad Atlantic Mallet Bolingbroke Music Hall England Candlelight Spring Fisherman, The Trad. Kennedy Folk England Spring Island in the Sun Belafonte Burgess Pastiche West Indies? Spring Marianina Trad. Hoare Folk Italy My Grandfather's Popular/ Spring Clock Clay Work Clay Work Music Hall America

270 Booklets from 1986: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Folk/Music Summer Erie Canal, The Allen Trad. Hall America In My Father's Summer Garden Trad. Trad. (trans.) Folk France Folk/Music Summer Blaydon Races Ridley Ridley Hall England 3511 Summer Mango Walk Trad. Trad. Calypso Jamaica Emlyn- Summer Cielito Lindo Trad. Edwards Folk Mexico Emlyn- Summer Mountain Farm Trad. Edwards Folk Wales Summer Tartan, The McKeller Bell National Scotland Wild Colonial Boy, Summer The Trad. Trad. Folk Ireland 677

271 Booklets from 1987: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Emlyn- Spring Joy of Springtime Trad. Edwards Folk Wales Spring Captain Nipper Trad. Trad. Folk/Shanty England Here Come the Spring Navvies Trad. Campbell Folk Ireland Spring Who Did Trad. Trad. Folk America National/ Spring Peanut Vendor, The Simons Simons Folk Cuba Round/ Spring Happy Days Unknown Unknown Bespoke Folk/ Spring Uist Tramping Song Bannerman Roberton National Scotland Where Did You Get Comic/ Spring That Hat Rolmag Rolmag Music Hall America Spring Hallelujah Handel Coombes Art/Bespoke England Spring Dancing Guitar Trad. Street Folk Italy Mountains I Love, Emlyn- Switzerlan Spring The Trad. Edwards Folk d Seventy-Six Broadway/ Spring Wilson Wilson Music Hall America Emlyn- Spring Hopak, The Trad. Edwards Folk Russia Autumn Santiago Nights Trad. Street Folk Chile Bare Necessities, Disney/ Autumn The Gilkyson Gilkyson Film Score America Comic/ Autumn Macnamara's Band O'Connor Stanford Film Score America Ching-a-ling, Tonk! Emlyn- Autumn Tonk! Trad. Edwards Folk Czech Autumn Diamond, The Trad. Trad. Folk/Shanty Scotland 2172 Autumn Echo Yodel Unknown Unknown Round England Autumn Frogs, The Unknown Unknown Round England Autumn Octopus's Garden Starkey Starkey Popular England Art/Film Autumn Walking In The Air Blake Blake Score England Christmas Children, Emlyn- Carol/Bespo Autumn The Coombes Edwards ke England Autumn Rise Up, Shepherd Trad. Trad. Carol/Folk America 15289 Autumn Gower Wassail, The Trad. Trad. Carol/Folk Wales 209 Autumn One Winter's Night Trad. Coombes Carol Germany

272 Booklets from 1989 (NB: no booklets available from 1988): Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Isle of Spring Little Red Bird Trad. Trad. Folk Man Drill, Ye Tarriers Spring Drill Trad. Casey Folk America Emlyn- Spring Coconut Tree Trad. Edwards Folk Philippines Spring Rain Song, The Unknown Parry Calypso Unknown Spring Pierlala Trad. Fullerton Folk Belgium Garden Where the Folk/ Spring Praties Grow Trad. Patterson Music Hall Ireland Spring Perched Up High Unknown Unknown Round Spring Viva la Musica Unknown Unknown Round Spring Mermaid, The Trad. Trad. Folk/Shanty England 124 Gwynn- Gwynn- Spring Gipsy, The Williams Williams National Wales Tinga-Ting Bird, Emlyn- Spring The Trad. Edwards Folk Italy Spring Ifca's Castle Trad. Jackson? Folk Czech Spring Whippoorwill Unknown Unknown Round Round/ Nursery Spring Where Is John? Trad. Trad. Rhyme England Farewell To Spring Tarwathie Trad. Trad. Folk Scotland 2562 Autumn Whip Jamboree Trad. Trad. Folk/Shanty England 488 Folk/ Autumn Turkey In The Straw Trad. Trad. Music Hall America Spread a little Comic/ Autumn Happiness Ellis Grey Music Hall England Educational/ Autumn Communication Corbett Corbett Bespoke England Educational/ Autumn Wrong Number Corbett Corbett Bespoke England Autumn Cob-O'_Coalin' Trad. Trad. Folk England 9234 Autumn Sleigh Bells Wheeler Wheeler Carol/Bespoke England Autumn What Child is This? Trad. Dix Carol/Folk England Thomas, Thomas, Autumn Winter Tales D & J D & J Carol/Art England Round/ Autumn Mince Pies Wheeler Wheeler Bespoke England Autumn Baloo Lammy Trad. Trad. Carol/Folk Scotland Children Go Where Autumn I Send Thee Trad. Trad. Carol/Spiritual America Round/ Autumn Ghosts Woods Woods Bespoke N/a

273 Section 2.5.6: 1990s BBC Singing Together Booklet Contents

Booklets from 1990: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Summer Midsummer Song Norlén Lindström National Sweden Drover's Dream, Summer The Trad. Trad. Folk Australia 5473 Holdstock & Holdstock Comic/ Summer Vet's Song Belford & Belford Educational England Alexander's Summer Band Berlin Berlin Popular/Jazz America Educational/ Summer Recipe Rap N/A Wheeler Rap England Educational/ Summer Good Eating Guide Wheeler Wheeler Blues England Summer Come to the Well Trad. Wheeler Folk/Bespoke Wales Educational/ Summer Skin Song Hazell Hazell Bespoke England Higgs & Higgs & Educational/ Summer Jump In The Line Cavanaugh Cavanaugh Bespoke England Spring Sumer is Icumen In Trad. Trad. Round/C14th England Spring Calling on Taylor Taylor Bespoke England Spring Nettle Wine McTell McTell Folk/Popular England Spring Scarecrow, The Trad. Sartin Folk/Popular England Folk/Nursery Spring Lelo Ledung Trad. Wheeler Rhyme Indonesia Harris & Harris & Spring Sun Arise Butler Butler Popular Australia Spring Heatwave Marsh Marsh Popular/Blues Unknown A Turtle Called Spring Myrtle Corbett Corbett Comic Unknown Calypso/ Spring Calypso Holdstock Holdstock Pastiche Unknown Road of Evolution, Spring The Wheeler Wheeler Educational Unknown

274 Booklets from 1991: Term Song Title Music Lyrics Genre(s) Origin Roud Spring Land And Sea Slater Street Educational Unknown Spring, Spring, Comic/ Spring Spring! De Paul Mercer Educational Unknown Spring Cotton Fields Ledbetter Ledbetter Folk/Blues America Seeger & Seeger & Spring Big Hewer, The McColl McColl Folk/National England Rigs of the Times, Spring The Trad. Trad. Folk England 876 Round/ Spring Market Song Diamond Diamond Educational Unknown Spring Smuggler's Lullaby Trad. Trad. Folk England Pastiche/ West Spring Island in the Sun Belafonte Burgess Film Score Indies? Spring Coasts of Barberry Trad. Trad. Folk/Shanty England 134 Spring Sea Sickness Marsh Marsh Comic Unknown Popular/ Spring Blue Rolling Ocean Marsh Marsh Bespoke Unknown Spring Journey's End Duggan Duggan Folk/Popular Ireland

275